In Summary
The play takes a thought-provoking look into the nature of political power, where losing it can mean losing everything.
Fresh from a controversial election win,
Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe is now the focus of an off-Broadway play in New
York that delves into the mind of one of the world’s most vilified
leaders.
The 89-year-old Mugabe, in power for 33 years, is
regarded by critics as an iron-fisted oppressor who has rigged multiple
elections and driven his once-prosperous nation into the ground.
But in British playwright Fraser Grace’s
“Breakfast with Mugabe,” the veteran leader, who was also a hero of the
struggle against colonial rule, is a depressed patient -- albeit a very
dangerous one.
Grace happened upon an article in the Times of
London around the time of Zimbabwe’s very tense 2002 election, which
Mugabe narrowly won against longtime political rival Morgan Tsvangirai,
in a vote observers and the opposition claimed was rigged.
The report said Mugabe was holed up in state house
being pursued by the malevolent spirit of a dead comrade and had called
on a white psychiatrist for help.
Whether the article was true or not, the concept
-- along with the crossover between western-style psychology and African
spiritual beliefs, and the enduring post-colonial puzzle -- piqued
Grace’s interest.
“When Mugabe was in the news, he was portrayed
entirely as a monster. And my starting position was that monsters are
made, not born,” Grace told AFP in a telephone interview from London.
“There is little doubt some of the ways he behaves
are monstrous, but interestingly he had many of the same experiences as
Nelson Mandela: liberation, prison, both suffered terrible humiliations
and oppression under colonial rule.”
However, Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, is credited with uniting his country after apartheid rule.
The play has only four characters, Mugabe and his
wife Grace, bodyguard Gabriel and white Zimbabwean psychiatrist Andrew
Peric, all of them trying to gain the upper hand.
Peric, played by actor Ezra Barnes, first runs
into the formidable Grace Mugabe, largely known as the
secretary-turned-mistress who married Mugabe shortly after his first
wife died and who lives a lavish lifestyle that has earned her the
nickname “The First Shopper” at home.
Alternately warm and menacing, Grace, played by
actress Rosalyn Coleman, goads Peric as he waits for her husband,
assuring her his intentions in treating the president are pure.
“And what in Zimbabwe do you think is pure?” she scoffs. “Do
what you are told or you will not be treating your patient for long.”
Mugabe, in a hauntingly accurate portrayal by
Michael Rogers, sought help from the psychiatrist, yet he fights against
being vulnerable to a white man, and their interactions are tense,
electric and emotional.
As the psychiatrist probes Mugabe about the ghost
-- known as a ngozi -- haunting him, the president hits out angrily with
his trademark sharp tongue about Peric’s white ancestors robbing
Africans of their land and their voice.
Peric, who has a keen understanding of Shona
culture, is described by actor Barnes as “post-racial” and tries to
defend himself. Like many whites whose forefathers moved to the
continent, he considers himself African.
Their sessions bring up Mugabe’s possible demons:
his betrayal of his first wife, his abandonment by his father as a boy
and the death of his own child during his 11 years of imprisonment by
Ian Smith’s white minority regime.
The leader of then-Rhodesia would not allow Mugabe leave to attend the funeral of his four-year-old son.
The play takes a thought-provoking look into the nature of political power, where losing it can mean losing everything.
“I am scared of the future,” the first lady admits at one point.
“Robert and I stayed with these people one time in
Romania, the Ceausescus... look at what happened to them,” in reference
to that country’s brutal leader Nicolae, shot by firing squad along
with his wife in 1990.
However, the threat of danger for Peric is also always there.
As a result of Mugabe’s controversial land
reforms, which saw hundreds of white farmers lose their land, some
killed or chased off in violent rampages, so-called war veterans have
camped on his tobacco farm.
Unfortunately for Peric, his association with
Mugabe has a chilling end for him and his family in the play, which has
been praised for its Shakespearean dimensions.
The play first appeared in a London theater in 2005, made it to
the West End and now the bright lights of New York where it will run
until October 6.
“It is astonishing to find the show coming out
just as another election has gone by. Things in many ways have gone
backwards,” said Grace.
The writer filed this analysis for AFP from New York
SOURCE: THE CITIZEN
SOURCE: THE CITIZEN
