ZIMBABWEAN writer-performer Tonderai Munyevu's new one-man show, Mugabe, My Dad & Me, appears in York Theatre Royal's brochures for both the Summer Of Love and The Haunted Season.

"Which one suits it best, Tonderai?", he is asked, when shown both. He smiles, then decides: "I think 'Haunted'. It sounds longer lasting. 'The Summer Of Love' sounds impermanent."

Tonderai is sitting by the first-floor bar at the Theatre Royal, ahead of his long-promised, pandemic-delayed world premiere opening tonight (9/9/2021), directed by Theatre Royal associate artist John R Wilkinson.

"I did a job in Bristol, then one week off, and we were going into rehearsals when everything stopped," he recalls. "It's just been postponed and postponed but I'm glad that John and the Theatre Royal have stuck with it."

Mugabe, My Dad & Me, running until September 18 in the main house, charts the rise and fall of one of the most controversial politicians of the 20th century through the personal story of Tonderai's Zimbabwean family and his relationship with his father.

"Around the time when Robert Mugabe was deposed as president in 2017, I just felt like I needed to be back there," he recalls. "At that point, I hadn't been there for a few years, not for safety, but more for work and family. I found it was triggering a reaction in me, thinking, 'I'm going to be in England, and not part of this amazing turnaround', when I want to experience it'."

Initially, Tonderai pondered doing a play based solely on freedom fighter-turned despot Mugabe's speeches from 1962 to 2017, or "potentially to 2018, when he did that final press conference that was so telling". "But then I thought, when I looked at my father's story, being born in subjugated Rhodesia, I should tell that story too," he says.

"I just knew my father's basic story; I knew he was my dad; he drank too much; he womanised; he was fantastic, such fun, but he was a wife beater too. He lost his job as an accountant I was about 11; he was in his 40s and life just changed for him at that point.

"Just as Mugabe's speeches changed from calling for equality and England knighting him to the speeches of the 1990s and his fall-out with [international development secretary] Clare Short and [Prime Minister] Tony Blair, going against the Lancaster House Agreement, over how land was to be dealt with and how people would be compensated. That fall-out led to an impoverishment of Zimbabwe that was unparalleled."

Tonderai set to writing Mugabe, My Dad And Me. "I knew if I made it too political, we'd lose the sense of a story being told, but if we could see it through a family's eyes, with the story of my father dying in an impoverished state, after I left with my mother when I was 12, that would work better," he says.

"The story of Zimbabwe is the story of Mugabe and the story of my father's generation, but also the story of my generation, who have moved away from home and are grappling with who they are, when you're asked, 'Where do you belong?', and you know you're technically part of that culture but you're not there anymore, so where do you belong?"

A quarter of Zimbabweans left southern Africa in the big exodus around 2003. "That happened once the economy tanked, the white farmers left and the land was not being cultivated. It started a very tragic downward turn," says Tonderai.

What about his father losing his job? How come? "The issue involved my father and another accountant at work having a dispute. They said my father wouldn't be fired if he offered an apology, but he felt hard done by and so he didn't apologise." Instead, he left the company.

"My mother and I then left before it got really bad for him, and I would keep in touch with letters, but not really knowing how things were for him. But then, when I went back, I learnt what really happened to his family, with my uncle being killed by white Rhodesians who had paraded his body as a warning to those who were guerrilla-fighting in the fields for freedom," says Tonderai.

"My family was never offered the land that was promised to freedom fighters, so Mugabe didn't deliver on that promise. There's no-one with moral authority in this story as you can't defend Mugabe, but equally Blair had a superficiality about him."

Learning more of his father and his family's back story led Tonderai to feel more sympathetic towards him. "Though my mother says, 'No, whatever happens in your life, it doesn't justify you being a wife-beating, womanising drinker'," he says.

As for Tonderai's own sense of identity as an African, Catholic, gay artist, he says: "It had always been connected with Mugabe's long, long life, like his contemporaries, The Queen and Prince Philip. Now I had to grapple with the President no longer being on pictures everywhere, but also that joy that now we have a democracy, we can protest on the street.

"I started looking at things, about where I wanted to be, and I wanted to understand myself, and part of that was understanding my farther. If you're an artist, you're an emotionally and intellectually mature person, and I want to investigate that."

Mugabe, My Dad And Me, premiering from tonight in York. For tickets: 01904 623568 or online at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.