We Need New Names review – playful staging of NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel

Brixton House, London
Director Monique Touko keeps the tone lively with this tough story of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe in which the actors switch race, age and gender with ease

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.