Daniel Nelson

Two men and a woman in a Zimbabwean prison cell. A woman? Well, one of the characters in The Rise and Shine of Comrade Fiasco explains, it makes for a better play.

It does, and you know immediately that you are in for flights of fancy, suggestion and symbolism, rather than 85 minutes of gritty social realism.

The three prisoners are joined in the cell by a fourth, a freedom fighter who has apparently been holed up in a cave for the first years of independence. Or has he? Was he really involved in the liberation struggle? His cellmates are suspicious because they know the noms de guerre of most of the men and women who fought the white settler regime, but they haven’t heard of Fiasco.

They prod and tease, cajole and bully the perplexed newcomer, but are unsatisfied and confused by his replies.

The audience is perplexed, too. What’s going on here? Who is this guy? Does he even exist? It doesn’t matter, because Andrew Whaley’s resurrected 1990 play is sharp and funny, and the acting full of vigour, switching in an instant from near knockabout to movingly sad and dramatic. Gradually it becomes clear that what is being acted out in the cell is a discussion about the disappointments of independence, how the idealism of revolution has given way to humdrum reality, how the heroes of the struggle are measuring out their lives as security guards and clerks, how different people accommodate themselves to the new reality, and how Comrade Fiasco is an awkward, uncomfortable reminder of what might have been.

The mood-swings, the time-changes, the elision between reality and imagination may confuse some: it’s best to sit back and enjoy it and stop being literal. It’s not fact versus fiction, which are opposites, but truth and fiction, which can go hand in hand.

And if the discussion raised by Comrade Fiasco's sudden appearance and the grievances with, for example, the behaviour of police and newly-installed officials resonated in 1990, think how much greater the resonances and

The Rise and Shine of Comrade Fiasco

The Rise and Shine of Comrade Fiasco

Image by Michael Shelford

grievances would be today.

* The Rise and Shine of Comrade Fiasco is at the Gate Theatre, 11 Pembridge Road, W11, until 21 March. Info: 7229 0706

 

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