The Rise and Shine of Comrade Fiasco

Wakey wakey, rise and shine, you’ve been asleep for the last eight years and you’re now in prison. That’s essentially the situation the eponymous protagonist of Andrew Whaley’s 1991 play finds himself in.

In Zimbabwe in 1986, Chidhina, Jungle and Febi have been locked up for getting drunk and fighty. A mysterious fourth prisoner is thrown into their cell, cloaked in rags and unable to remember anything. The cramped, barred, four-walled room is this strange figure’s rude awakening.

He’s been up in the mountains for eight  years, living in a cave while the rest of Zimbabwe fought for and won independence. So he’s missed quite a lot. But no-one – neither him, his fellow prisoners, or the audience – is entirely sure whether this fourth man is real.  

Whaley’s play remains deliberately oblique, telling a fantastical, almost magical realist story. It mixes misremembered histories, war traumas and childlike play-acting together in an infuriatingly obtuse melting pot of a plot. To begin with, the newcomer won’t speak to his cellmates. But slowly, as the three start performing a slapstick version of their own histories, the man remembers his name is Comrade Fiasco and his past begins to return to him. It’s a past that provokes fury in Chidhina: while he was facing bloodshed and war, Fiasco was hiding from the world.

It’s a wilfully surreal tale which Whaley tells with poetry, but little clarity.  Elayce Ismail’s compact, muscular production features a superbly dynamic ensemble cast – onstage the whole time – that bring out the piece’s clowning humour very well. Kurt Egyiawan is arresting as the tortured Chidhina, whose character twists from peace to violence unnervingly fast. Abdul Salis is also strong, whose hurt, lost Fiasco has flashes of wild ferocity. He seems to drop from nowhere into the cell, which in Rosanna Vize’s crafty designs bends and warps as much as truth in this play.

These ragged characters and their stories are a kind of allegory for Zimbabwe’s past and the trauma of war. But ‘The Rise and Shine of Comrade Fiasco’ wades through its fragmented and dream-like tales with some difficulty. Truth and fiction are bundled up together and Whaley’s writing just doesn’t give us the time or the space to fully enjoy or understand either.