‘Breakfast With Mugabe’ is a one-act play by British playwright Fraser Grace, and it’s currently on show off-Broadway at the Lion Theatre in New York.
The controversial play was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2005 – after its creator read a newspaper article which claimed that the Zimbabwean dictator had once consulted a white psychiatrist for depression.
If the story is true, it makes for a tantalising premise.
That the one of the world’s longest-serving, oldest, most violent and oppressive leaders – who has single handedly taken Zimbabwe from being a net exporter of food into a grovelling recipient of humanitarian aid – actually feels guilty about his deeds.
In the play, Andrew Peric is a white doctor with a liberal conscience. One day, he is summoned to State House, the president’s palace in the capital Harare, by Mugabe’s much-younger wife, Grace.
“The President of Zimbabwe is afraid of his own shadow,” she says to him in the 100-minute long play. He is being haunted by an ‘Ngozi’, she claims, an evil spirit in the tradition of Mugabe’s majority Shona tribe.
Sounds like a cracker, actually. It will be on at Theater Row, 410 West 42nd Street, New York, until March 1.
[Source : Daily Beast]
