In a place called Paradise a raggle-taggle bunch of children scrump guavas and gambol about in the dust. They are 10 and 11 years old and Chipo, so traumatised she can barely speak, is pregnant. This is Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and it is far from paradise.
In NoViolet Bulawayo’s Booker-shortlisted novel, on which the play is based, a story of appalling poverty, violence and injustice is rendered comic by a sparky young narrator who doesn’t understand what she is reporting. In the first half of Mufaro Makubika’s smart dramatisation, the reporting happens through the collective act of dancing and game-playing, in which the children innocently re-enact the lynchings and robberies they have witnessed, as well as trying to administer their own cures (a game of doctors over Chipo’s rounded belly involves some excruciating business with a coat hanger). This keeps the tone lively and funny at the cost of some of the novel’s political horror.
Darling, the kick-ass ringleader of a group that inevitably ritualises the sexism of its elders, dreams of joining her aunt in the US. In the second half, she has arrived in Michigan, and the play shifts into the comic realism of a displaced family trying to reconcile its own traditions and self-image with a culture of gym and pizza. Paradise, meanwhile, becomes an illusion preserved through faltering phone calls with those left behind.
The clarity of the storytelling enables the six actors in Monique Touko’s supple production to fluently switch race, age and gender, with their accents and body language becoming ever more homogenised and American. Choreographer Ricardo da Silva deserves a big shout-out for leading the cast on this very physical journey.
Only Lukwesa Mwamba plays a single role, her entrancing Darling gleaming in a gold frock against the darkness of Ingrid Hu’s minimalist design. Elsewhere, the doubling tells its own story, of how age and environment constantly reframe experience. Through the disintegration in a care home of a proud old warrior (portrayed by the same actor who earlier played the kookiest of the kids), it makes a chilling existential point: that senility is the comic waywardness of childhood replayed as tragedy and it is coming for us all.
• At Brixton House, London, until 6 May. Then touring until 10 June.
