‘Why do you need the dark if what you do is fair?’: staging death, violence, and the TRC in Yaël Farber’s Molora

Abstract

This article discusses Yaël Farber’s 2003 play Molora within the context of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which Farber consciously draws on through the play’s themes, characters, and narrative structure. At the same time, however, Molora is also an adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, with strong parallels established especially to the trial scene at the end of the trilogy’s final play, the Eumenides. In this article I analyse the relationship Farber establishes to both Aeschyus’s trilogy and ancient Greek staging conventions in general, while also discussing how she integrates the ancient Greek narrative into a South African post-Apartheid context. Thereby, particularly the parallels Farber draws between the establishment of the ancient Greek law-court, the Areopagus, with the South African TRC will be assessed, with a particular focus on issues of visualization, representation, performativity, and communal memory.