The Stage

Breakfast with Mugabe

Published Wednesday 10 May 2006 at 15:30 by Mark Shenton

The RSC is currently on a roll - while it has just launched its biggest ever, year-long Complete Works celebration of its house playwright in Stratford-upon-Avon, it is offering two of the most throbbing, intense, political dramas in London too - Arthur Miller’s epic classic The Crucible has transferred from Stratford to the Gielgud and now the far more intimate, domestically-scaled Breakfast with Mugabe, premiered under the RSC’s New Work Festival banner, has followed it from Stratford, via Soho Theatre, to the Duchess.

Inspired by a British newspaper report about a real-life encounter between the Zimbabwean president and a white psychiatrist he summonsed to attend him when he was stalked by a ‘ngozi’ - the bitter spirit of a murdered comrade - Fraser Grace’s play is a brilliantly imagined journey into what might have happened behind the closed doors of Harare’s Presidential Palace when they met.

Monstrous personalities, from Richard III to Robert Maxwell (recently reincarnated in Lies Have Been Told at the Trafalgar Studios and soon returning there) have always made for strong theatrical company. But Grace’s play doesn’t do the obvious thing and merely cast him merely as a man who has brought Zimbabwe - once one of Africa’s most prosperous countries - literally to its knees but as a complex tyrant whose own vanity (and possibly insanity) to cling to power at all costs has cost the country’s inhabitants even more.

With Joseph Mydell impersonating him with chilling accuracy, there’s also superb support from Noma Dumezweni as his power and status hungry wife, David Rintoul as the psychiatrist and Christopher Obi as the president’s bodyguard.