Zimbabwean playwright Andrew Whaley’s latest play, Rolling Heads, follows the escapades of two men attempting to flee from Mugabe’s psychotic regime for the uncertain haven of South Africa. They travel underground in what is essentially an extended mixed metaphor weaved throughout the play – a surreal vehicle called “son of the soil” – constructed from the detritus of perverted political terminology. The vehicle’s ‘moral compass’ however, will not allow them to escape easily.
Similar in style to Mike van Graan’s recent darkly comic Hostile Takeover, the script is chock-full of satirical paronomasia, political double entendres and witticisms. That well-known Elizabethan phrase you go “to hear a play” applies aptly to Heads. Unfortunately, Dylan Wilson-Max as the garrulous Osborne blusters his way through the lines rather ruinously. Far more stable is Tembinkosi Njokweni as the existentially tortured Memory – a municipal worker forced under Operation Restore Order to demolish his own home and evict his family.
When the dramatic action frees itself from the largely rhetorical – though intelligent and imaginative word play, this production rides roughshod over the more riveting human tragedies contained in its narrative. Director Adam Niell seems to shy away from going for real blood, though the text plainly gives him the opportunity.
Crucially Whaley unleashes yet never looses control of his anger and frustration at the insanity of a country and populace pointlessly decimated. The play seethes too with self-loathing and collaborative guilt amongst ordinary Zimbabweans. Not enough people are prepared to stand up and risk death to dislodge the dictator, though dying they are by attrition.
The final chilling vision is of Mugabe crushed as his state residence collapses on him. His last three words describe what’s on his syphilitic brain as he dies, ‘Miss Rural Zimbabwe’.
It is a play that should travel.
