Cauldron of vengeance
Lloyd Evans
Breakfast with Mugabe Soho Waiting for Godot Barbican Mack and Mabel Criterion Here comes Mugabe. Very creepy and correct in his sleek double-breasted suit and, yes, there it is, that emaciated little moustache that looks like a charred caterpillar. In Breakfast with Mugabe, Joseph Mydell’s impersonation of the Zimbabwean president is eerily accurate. His spoken English is erudite and flowery. He’s highly intelligent, prone to sudden rages, yet forceful and charming when he can be bothered to exert himself. A confused, sensitive, jumpy, glowering man. The author Fraser Grace condemns the monster not by making him monstrous but by making him human. Mugabe’s pathological hatred of whites seems forgivable when you consider that the Rhodesian regime imprisoned him for 11 years in a cell too small to lie down in. Mugabe’s infant son died while he was in jail, and Ian Smith personally intervened to deny Mugabe leave to attend the funeral. Not a wacko murderer, then, but a rational case, a cauldron of hurt and vengeance. Mrs Mugabe, wonderfully played by Noma Dumazweni, comes across as a globe-trotting shopaholic sex bomb, all Armani and manipulation. But her personality lacks the subtlety and the complexity of Mugabe’s. Ditto the character of Dr Peric, a psychiatrist hired to cure Mugabe of his paranoid delusions. The play traces the fraught relationship between the president and his doctor but their exchanges don’t lead anywhere. Mugabe tires of his treatment and the doctor is simply kept hanging around the palace with nothing to do but chat to the acerbic missus. ‘Mugabe’s father was a carpenter,’ she says dryly; ‘naturally, he considers himself the Messiah.’ As documentary the show succeeds but it lacks a proper dramatic climax. There’s a punch-up between the white shrink and a black bodyguard (a clumsy symbol of colonialism, maybe) which is so poorly choreographed that everyone laughed. Then comes a sharp swerve and we hear that Dr Peric’s upcountry tobacco farm has been invaded by squatters. But hang on. A psychiatrist with a tobacco farm? How much curing can one man do in a day? This wonky plotting gives the writer a chance to dramatise the land issue in Zimbabwe but he doesn’t have anything new or interesting to say about it. Antony Sher’s direction is helped by Martin Slavin’s terrific soundtrack. Each time Mugabe moves from one wing of his residence to another there’s a great clanking and trundling of security gates and we hear hushed instructions buzzing and rustling over short-wave radios. These unsettling effects are very revealing. The president is a prisoner of his own position. This is a decent show which falls short of being a triumph. Hats off, but not hats in the air.
Waiting for Godot at the Barbican is a revival of Dublin’s Gate Theatre production of 1991. If anything, the show gains from the actors’ familiarity with the text. The tramps are at ease with their despair and they contemplate suicide with smirking grimaces. One niggle — the tree is so flimsy you couldn’t hang a balloon from it, let alone a philosopher, but that’s a small error in a hugely entertaining production.
Another surefire hit at the Criterion. Mack and Mabel (by Jerry Hello Dolly Herman) traces the romance between the film mogul Mack Sennett and his leading lady Mabel Normand. The cast are talented multitaskers. All of them can dance, sing, act and play several instruments. David Soul, as Mack, exudes an air of tender fatigue, and his untutored voice strikes the right balance between grittiness and lyricism. Janie Dee, as Mabel, has a native exuberance that never dims or fails. Her lush charisma drives this show through its tricky, tragic material. Musicals are like dinners, they need sweet endings, but this one finishes messily, nastily even. From international stardom Mabel descends into cocaine addiction, splits up with Mack and becomes embroiled in a scandal after her new lover is discovered shot dead in his apartment. No one ever found out if Mabel pulled the trigger. One leaves with a slight sense of disappointment but I doubt if that will keep the crowds away.
The show arrives in the West End to greet the annual influx of journeying Americans. Some of them may have waddled down to the Old Vic to see how Kevin Spacey’s getting on. But he’s shut up shop. All the better for this show and for David Soul who, I was amazed to learn, has been living here for a decade and now carries a British passport. T.S. Eliot did the same and ended up with the Order of Merit. Hang in there, Hutch.
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