Breakfast With Mugabe: biting political drama finally arrives in South Africa

The Guardian

6 days ago

I am standing outside the hallowed walls of the Market theatre, Newtown, Johannesburg. This is the place where Athol Fugard – surely the greatest of South African playwrights and one of my all-time theatre heroes – staged plays including Hello and Goodbye and The Island. The latter was co-written with fellow theatre greats, actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. Now it's the turn of a little-known English writer and his play Breakfast With Mugabe. This is, as they say, one of the days of my life.
In 2001 my script felt like urgent work. Elections loomed in Zimbabwe, and Robert Mugabe was reportedly unleashing terrible violence in his bid to cling to power. To many in the UK 'President Bob' had long been a monster. But what, I wondered, created the monster?
The play finds Mugabe holed-up in State House, pursued by the bitter spirit of a long-dead comrade. Denied help by traditional healers, the former liberation leader reluctantly turns to a white psychiatrist. Cue the unravelling of history.
Interest in Breakfast With Mugabe was immediate, and persistent. The late (and much missed) Antony Sher directed a Royal Shakespeare Company production that travelled from Stratford in 2005 via Soho theatre to the West End in 2006. An audio version flourished on BBC Radio 3 and the World Service; a second UK production followed, while in the US a production by Two Planks & A Passion (directed by David Shookhoff) clocked up 100 performances on New York's 42nd Street. Another production was staged in Berkeley.
Since then, Mugabe has died and Zimbabwe bumps along in comparative peace. So a new production – especially in South Africa – came as a surprise.
According to Greg Homann, the idea blossomed slowly. In 2022, Greg – whose theatre work spans the US, UK and South Africa – was associate artist at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham. Then his 'dream job' became a reality. Returning to South Africa as artistic director of the Market theatre, one of the first artists he encountered was a young director fast building a reputation as an innovative theatre-maker. Calvin Ratladi had, sometime in 2016, chanced on a copy of Breakfast With Mugabe. The play stuck with him; would the Market produce it?
Sadly, that plan stalled. Then, earlier this year, Ratladi was named Standard Bank's young artist of the year for theatre. This award is quite a gong (its first winner was Richard E Grant). It brings with it support for a creative project – and an opportunity was glimpsed. If Ratladi still held a torch for his Mugabe project, the Market theatre would host. Remarkably, he was as keen as ever. A theatre polymath and renowned disability activist, for him this four-handed, pressure-cooker play of psychology and spirituality presented exciting new challenges.
If this partly answers the 'why here, why now?' question, why do Ratladi and Homann think the play resonates in the new South Africa?
For Homann, the play typifies the Market's longstanding commitment to 'an entwining of politics and theatre' – a tradition vital to the theatre's co-founders Barney Simon and Mannie Manim, and to one of the many playwrights they championed, Athol Fugard, who sadly died in March. Recent shows at the Market have examined the life and legacy of other significant South African figures, among them Winnie Mandela and Robert Sobukwe. As Ratladi points out, Breakfast With Mugabe extends this tradition; a play about a hero of the liberation movement – this time from outside South Africa, and one whose legacy is hotly contested.
This is especially true among Zimbabweans, an estimated one to three million of whom now live in South Africa. Hearings into the Gukurahundi in Matabeleland in the mid 1980s have only just begun in earnest. In that massacre, Mugabe ordered his army's North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade to suppress his party's opponents. An estimated 20,000 Zimbabweans were murdered.
At the production's first night in Johannesburg, it was clear the play retains its bite. Themba Ndaba and Craig Jackson lock the president and his shrink in a terrible struggle for supremacy; Gontse Ntshegang shines as the manipulative Grace Mugabe, drawing howls of laughter for her indiscretions as 'the First Shopper', while Zimbabwean-born Farai Chigudu exudes menace – and barely controlled violence – as the bodyguard/secret policeman, Gabriel.
With the first three performances sold out, audiences (as audiences will in South Africa) whooped, gasped and sighed at every zinger or put-down – verbal or physical – delivered by the cast.
I've been lucky. The play has almost always been well received by audiences as well as critics. In the US however, what I believed was a play about colonial culpability was celebrated as an essay on interracial conflict, pure and simple. Do Americans struggle to see their country implicated as a colonial power?
In South Africa by contrast, it's the impact of colonial oppression that deafens. Post-liberation rewards – the justice so long awaited by black South Africans – never materialised for many. How the country's current government can ever deliver redress is a hot-button political issue for President Cyril Ramaphosa – and one critical to the future of South Africa's 63 million inhabitants.
And what does Ratladi's unexpected, bracing new production offer the playwright? A lesson. Whatever we may think we've written, a play can – simply by shifting its context in time and space – make us think and feel something new. It is after all play – a living, unfolding, mutable thing. Like all true play, its punches do not always land where expected.
Breakfast with Mugabe is at the Market theatre, Johannesburg, until 10 August