The 2012 Theatre in the Park season opens tonight with the premiere of a play titled The Coup.The play opens to the public tomorrow and will run until March 11.
Producer of the play, Daves Guzha, of Rooftop Promotions said it would bring a new dimension to theatre.
We always try to communicate about issues affecting our country through theatre and art in general, said Guzha.
We have taken a new dimension of exploring these issues from the spiritual world perspective and we are hopeful of driving our point home. We want to send a message to our leadership and to the society at large.
Written by New Zealand-based Zimbabwean, Stanley Makuwe, the play focuses on the hard times the country went through a few years ago.
The play is set around the health sector where everything ultimately ends up in a mortuary. It is the mortuary that becomes the stage with protagonists being dead bodies.
The cadavers tell of the suffering they have encountered in their double experience of both the world of the living and the dead.
Despite some of them being already in their decomposing state, they manage to organise themselves to revolt against the repressive government led by a corrupt dictator.
- Chamisa under fire over US$120K donation
- Mavhunga puts DeMbare into Chibuku quarterfinals
- Pension funds bet on Cabora Bassa oilfields
- Councils defy govt fire tender directive
Keep Reading
The bodies are led by the youthful corpse of a former teacher to stage a coup, killing the president in the process.
The presidents top colleagues are not spared as the dead bodies want to achieve total emancipation. Old habits seem to die hard as the dead presidents soul tries to bribe itself into heaven during the same night albeit unsuccessfully.
The play has a riveting plot that Makuwe attributes to a short story he authored titled Life in a Third-World Mortuary from which the play was created.
The short story was shortlisted on the 2005 BBC short story competition.
In 1996, as a final-year nursing student at one of the major public hospitals in Zimbabwe, I witnessed a devastating industrial action by health professionals, said Makuwe.
Students were not allowed to go on strike, so we became the backbone of a paralysed health system. We carried out duties of doctors, nurses, cleaners and mortuary attendants. Negotiations for a pay rise for health professionals kept hitting a brickwall for nearly a month. Many people died in hospitals. The mortuary looked like a scene in the movie Hotel Rwanda.
He said during one of his many visits to the mortuary to dump yet another dead body something struck him. I just imagined: If all these bodies piled up on the floor were to speak, what would they say? Who would they hold responsible for the unfortunate loss of their lives? What action would they take?
To give a voice to the dead, he wrote the short story Life in a Third-World Mortuary and out of that short, story the play was created.
