Mugabe, My Dad & Me review – a powerful personal tale of celebration and healing

York Theatre Royal
Tonderai Munyevu's semi-autographical show addresses Zimbabwe's traumatic history with honesty and humour

Clothes hang in broken rows above the bare stage (Nicolai Hart-Hansen's design). Dresses, suits, uniforms - they are presences that suggest absences, the ghosts" of the people in the stories that Tonderai Munyevu and Millie Chapanda are bringing to life through words and music.

The text of Mugabe, My Dad & Me, written by Munyevu, is an assemblage of the events that have shaped his complicated identity as a gay, black Zimbabwean man". The narrative is set in motion by a white man's question: Where are you from?" Never shrinking from confronting the (overwhelmingly white) audience with the lazy tropes of the colonial mindset, Munyevu sets before us intersecting histories, both personal and political, bouncing, non-linear" between Zimbabwe and the UK, past and present.