A painfully thought-provoking production exploring what it means to be human and the chilling revelation that good and evil co-exists, can be viewed at the Andre Huguenet Theatre. Presented by the Performing Arts Council of the Free State (Pacofs), the drama is titled A Human Being Died That Night.
The production will run from Thursday (08/06) until Saturday (10/06), starting at 18:00. The play reflects on the reality that evil and good cuts through every individual and society.
The production stems from encounters of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a court-like restorative justice body assembled in South Africa in 1996 after the end of apartheid. Directed by Gerben Kamper, the play exposes the natural drama which occurs when a white Afrikaner man and a black African woman face each other over the bitterness and pain of a recent violent history.
Prof. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a psychologist who grew up in a black South African township, interviews Eugene de Kock, the commanding officer of state-sanctioned death squads under apartheid. Following her initial exposure to him as the psychological chair of the TRC, Gobodo-Madikizela met with De Kock in Pretoria’s maximum-security prison in 1997, where he was serving a 212-year sentence for crimes against humanity. In a series of profoundly disturbing and arresting interview scenes, playwright Nicholas Wright exposes Gobodo-Madikizela’s struggle with conflicting professional and personal internal fluctuations between holding him accountable and finding him forgivable.
Ultimately, vivid and scathing portrayals of Gobodo-Madikizela by Karabelo Lekalake Plaatjie and Peter Taljaard as De Kock allow audiences to witness an extraordinary awakening of conscience and the agony of bitter regret in a theatrical experience which redefines the nature of remorse and challenges the limits of forgiveness.
They are a man and woman from the old and new South Africa, respectively, forced to the very outskirts of the boundaries surrounding their individual capacities for understanding, forgiveness, and empathy.
De Kock describes his horrific committing of mass murder along with a part of himself and the insecure, stuttering boy with the thick spectacles who grew up to become the monstrous “prime evil” apartheid assassin. Gobodo-Madikizela moves the audience from a conference setting to right inside the confining bars of his prison cell to confront a barrage of burning questions.
De Kock recalls the faces of his victims who fill his mind and the theatre with their restless spirits. The journey is painful to undertake and observe because we all know, as Gobodo-Madikizela does, that there are no prime evil monsters in the world, only fellow human beings who live and die, just as we all do.
Tickets sell for R80 and R100 at Webtickets, Boxer, Pick n Pay, and the Pacofs booking office.
