Breakfast With Mugabe — laying a ghost to rest, awakening a monster

The stage is a divided realm, its representation of Harare State House, circa 2001, visually emerging from the raw earth, bursting up through the rubble and detritus of an African wasteland. The presidential living room, where most of the play’s intrigue unfolds, is surrounded by a landscape that’s been literally and metaphorically pillaged. 

First the colonisers came, and then something else: each, in turn, have infiltrated the earth, dug into it, taken from it, poisoned it, left bodies and other secrets buried beneath it.

It’s in the privileged setting of Robert Mugabe’s domestic quarters that we first meet his wife, the malicious and manipulative “First Shopper”, played by Gontse Ntshegang as a woman you don’t want to mess with. 

Slippery, full of machinations, used to getting her way, she struts around the furniture, bending the ear of a white psychiatrist and tobacco farm owner named Peric (Craig Jackson), who has been summoned and is waiting to conduct his initial consultation with the Zimbabwean leader.

Grace Mugabe’s initial niceties – offering Peric a beverage as she talks him through the president’s disturbing visitations by an ngozi, the malevolent spirit of a fallen comrade – unsubtly hints at her own ever-burgeoning self-interest. 

Along with expensive taste in clothes, she has an instinct for survival and every chance she gets unabashedly tries to persuade the doctor to see her point of view – she needs her husband cured of whatever affliction ails him.

Peric, who has treated other Zimbabweans afflicted by unwelcome spirits, is reverential, respectful, polite. Whether or not he recognises his hostess for the viper she is, is unclear. 

When Mugabe finally enters, you’re left with little doubt that this is both a man assailed by some unnatural force – and a tyrant to be feared. 

“I have been informed that I will not live forever,” he tells Peric. It’s a joke delivered deadpan, but it’s also possible to detect in Themba Ndaba, who plays the titular despot, a menacingly unironic desire to rule forever.

Also on stage is Zimbabwean-born Farai Chigudu as the bodyguard/secret policeman, Gabriel, who like some well-attired bouncer seems to be forever lurking on stage. His role? Well, he’s a bit like “Chekhov’s gun” – if you introduce a musclebound thug in the first scene, there should be thuggish violence somewhere down the line.

The production is Breakfast With Mugabe, first directed for the Royal Shakespeare Company by Sir Antony Sher in 2005. 

It’s now playing at the Market Theatre after a brief debut at Makhanda’s National Arts Festival. Directed by Calvin Ratladi, this year’s Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre, it was penned by the Cambridge-based playwright Fraser Grace, who came across a 2001 newspaper report about the Zimbabwean president receiving treatment from a white psychiatrist. 

While reports suggested he was being treated for depression, the play imagines that Mugabe was in fact battling a malevolent spirit. 

The playwright, after watching a performance of Ratladi’s production, wrote in the UK’s Guardian newspaper that he’d been interested in what might have been at the root of Mugabe’s transition from revolutionary hero to dictatorial monster.

The play is wordy, dense and fraught with the strangest sort of tension. And, despite the title, breakfast never comes.

Cue, instead, a succession of lengthy conversations unpacking not only what might have led to this supernatural stalking, but an unravelling of history with some of the unwritten bits coloured in. 

While it leaves little doubt as to the rot of paranoia and corruption that’s infected Mugabe’s regime, it’s also a reminder of the colonial context from which that regime emerged. 

Rather than a one-sided condemnation, the dialogue also digs into Mugabe’s bitter memories – such as being refused permission by Ian Smith, in the course of his 11-year imprisonment, to bury his young son.

Ratladi, who is 34, was born in Limpopo and grew up in Witbank, the son of a miner, says that “over the years, as I have been finding myself as an artist, what seems to recur in my work and which I found them paralleled in the play are issues of land, and issues of memory and power”.

Those issues are deeply mired in the dialogue, but they are also conveyed in the design. For one thing, Ratladi’s own past is right there on the stage, represented by the shattered landscape. 

“I grew up in the mines,” he says, “so what you see is the landscape of my childhood.” 

Indeed, the representation of the land, this violated earth, in Ratladi’s rendition of the play is of something forlorn, quite sombre. Never mind the various people and factions involved, it is the silent earth that has been witness to everything we have done to it in its name: acquiring it, fighting over it, digging it up, drilling into it, taking from it, burying our secrets and the bodies of the dead in it.

“The ground also has its own vibrations,” Ratladi says. “But there’s also violence that’s being done on this thing called land. For me, it’s a kind of penetration, a violation. And the question arises: how deep into the earth does the system in fact go?”

Ratladi says he was drawn to the play by themes close to his heart, fascinated with the idea that “what this figure of Robert Mugabe was actually grappling with might in fact have been a spiritual issue”. He also wanted to reveal the human side of its characters who are larger-than-life historic figures.

He says he had wanted – as a director – to be able to enter into a dialogue with the work and with its author. 

“Deciding on this play was a matter of discovering what sits in the body as important knowledge and figuring out how to work collaboratively with someone else’s writing – to have a conversation with the work and also include the interests and embodied experiences of the performers.”

The play does not pander, nor does it give any easy answers. “I’m trying to open a conversation,” Ratladi says. 

“As much as we can discuss Mugabe’s passionate rhetoric about the land and his insistence on taking things back, this is the same man who earned seven degrees while in prison, and who embraced Western ways of thinking. And there’s the fact that he sought medical help in Europe, rather than in the people around him.” 

And so questions as to Mugabe’s true beliefs – and his motivations – remain.

“When I look into the story, I think there was a spiritual awakening, perhaps a calling, that wasn’t fully embraced,” says Ratladi. “And it caused a lot of suffering.”

Like several Shakespearean antiheroes, most notably Macbeth, evidence of Mugabe’s autocratic self-delusion is everywhere in this play. He possesses an ability to terrify that he wields with frightening calm. When he initially meets Peric, his first test is to demand that the psychiatrist puts on a different necktie, an act of supplication for which the white doctor has a lengthy, feasible excuse. 

Peric’s apparent bolshiness – psychiatric professionalism tinged by thinly disguised colonial patronage – is something Mugabe seems to let slide. 

First it’s the refusal of a necktie that would render him a member of Mugabe’s staff, and then it’s the manner in which Peric lays down the ground rules for the therapy sessions as though he were talking to just another patient.

What’s perhaps most frustrating about Peric is his blind refusal to recognise just how dangerous the man he’s treating is. At various points, you might suspect it’s naiveté, perhaps pompousness. Through a certain lens, it’s evidence of deeply rooted colonialism, an assumption of some unstated privilege so engrained he’s not even aware it exists.

Peric, despite his relative position on the social rung, refuses to bend to Mugabe’s small tests, and it’s no accident that Grace Mugabe tells him that he and her husband are “so much alike”.

The two men lock horns in a weirdly convivial manner. Theirs is an unspoken conflict that drives the play’s underlying tension, unease and menace, a feeling that anything can – and is likely to – happen. Whatever its cause, the audience senses the friction and feels the under-the-surface power struggle implicitly.

“When I direct, I always tell my actors that if someone deaf were to watch, they’d still follow the story,” Ratladi says. 

“So, if you were to watch my show with earplugs, you would still ‘hear’ the production. If you are blind, you would still follow. That’s how I approach the work: with a desire to cater for more ‘other’ audiences.”

This idea of widening the audience is a metaphor, too, for Ratladi’s belief that “the South African conversation needs to be far more inclusive, to welcome to the table a wider range of people”.

“Right now, as theatre-makers, we’re not listening enough,” he says. “Theatre made during apartheid had a clear ‘state of advocacy’. These days, we’re all over the place. Under apartheid, the status quo that needed to be defeated was very clear. But what is our status quo today? What are we currently critiquing? What are we challenging? I think we’re all over the place. 

“After the centuries of coloniality, we should as a nation be asking ourselves more fundamental questions: ‘Where are we as the people?’ and ‘Where do we go from here?’ I think those are the stories we, as theatre-makers, should be telling, the ones that pose questions, stories that dare to ask, ‘Where in actual fact we are as a nation?’”

These are not questions that are answered in Breakfast With Mugabe. 

The play does not try to patch up the past by offering a theory about the future. Ratladi’s hope, though, is that it will perhaps help you to recognise that your perceived reality is a kind of acquiescence to the status quo; if you let it wash through you, it might just wake you up, encourage you to get involved in a consequential conversation that desperately needs to happen. DM

Breakfast With Mugabe is a co-production of the National Arts Festival, The Market Theatre and Festival Enterprise Catalyst, in association with the Calvin Ratladi Foundation, with contributing funding from Standard Bank South Africa. It is playing at the Market Theatre until 10 August.