Idi Amin cut down to size

10 April 2012

ALL arrayed in white leather uniform and gold boots, toy medals glittering on his lapel, forever dancing and prancing, voice a fog-horn bellow of threats, Sello Sebotsane's riveting Field Marshal Idi Amin has the air of a man serenely going out of his rather small mind. Aptly so. Big Dada, performed by the South African company, Third World Bunfight, ingeniously plays out the political life of the Ugandan dictator of the Seventies as the theatrical equivalent of a cartoon strip, and as a comment on a cowed country in the grip of a megalomanic mass-murderer. Black farce, you could say, takes a fresh turn for the amusing better.

Author Brett Bailey, who also briskly directs and designs this dark show, chronicles Amin's barbarous eight-year rule in a disconnected series of vivid tableaux that are fortified by catchy African song and dance. The idea is to cut the absurd Amin down to size, while never losing sight of his murderous potency. With a beer crate to give him height, watched by a posse of blank-eyed functionaries in dinner jackets or fatigues, Sebotsane's Amin seizes power as if it were some new toy.

The tyrant's power-mongering is chillingly viewed in toyshop, childlike terms: an excited Amin clutches the toy tanks and missiles he will receive when he jettisons the Zionist cause he's accidentally adopted. He returns home happily with a full shoppingbag. Blood-stained marionettes jovially sing in accompaniment to a musicbox tune "They chopped us into pieces." Two toy crocodiles hunt for human flesh.

Bailey beautifully captures the authentic Amin lingo, which veers between Alice in Wonderland and the uneasy, illiterate. "The lot of you, you're all abolished," he rages. "I have got very good brains."

The meandering second half fails to explain Amin's decline or his tyrannical regime's durability, yet the final images of the dictator - swigging whisky as he feasts upon the bloody innards of the corpse he clasps, and his jubilant singing of Sinatra's I Did it my Way - memorably convey Amin's monstrousness and banal pride.

Big Dada - The Rise And Fall Of Idi Amin Dada

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