No play in town tolls a more alarming bell or so forcefully urges heads-in-the- sand theatre audiences to awareness of the late, long impact of imperialism than Breakfast with Mugabe.
Fraser Grace's intriguing play is sometimes hard to follow, appearing schematic and melodramatic in Anthony Sher's vivid though over-paced production.
Yet it offers a resounding counter to those simply writing off Mugabe as Zimbabwe's evil dictator who starves his people while the world looks on.
It is Grace's conceit that in 2001 Mugabe, haunted and harried like Macbeth by a dead rival's spirit, submits to treatment by David Rintoul's ridiculously ranting Peric, a white, farm-owning psychiatrist with a black wife.
Grace's unbelievably control-freakish Peric begins a battle for dominance of his patient that Joseph Mydell's hypnotically cool, scarcely paranoid Mugabe opposes with muted aplomb.
Ancient black-white power conflict revives until a shocking ironic transference occurs.
Noma Dumezweni as Mrs Mugabe and Christopher Obi's bodyguard contribute to Peric's downfall.
Grace implies Mugabe, once imprisoned without trial and forbidden to attend his infant son's funeral, represents the inevitable force of black revenge run mad and self destructive.
Until 10 June (0870 890 1103).
The RSC's New Work Festival: Breakfast With Mugabe
