It's Me... Mandela

It’s Me… Mandela, ostensibly about Nelson Mandela’s life, actually has little to do with Mandela; it concerns mostly Mandela’s relationship with his brother.  Without giving too much away: the depicted relationship is entirely fictional.  The opening narrative mentions, from the perspective of an eight-year-old in a seventeen-year-old’s body, Mandela’s relevance to the end of apartheid; everything else in the play, though, might have related to an entirely fictional character.  In fact, it did.

The mirth on offer was of two kinds.  One, arising in the writing, was a series of fairly primitive pranks designed to make us cringe, embarrassed, rather than delight in any surprises.  The script returned several times to hammer home visual genital jokes and toilet humour, but certainly had the audience laughing for a while.  The other kind, the acting itself, was funnier, as Dayne Rathbone has a gift for facial expression and accompanying vocal tics; apparent inadequacy sympathetically makes him the butt of his own script.

Don’t attend this to see a light-hearted treatment of Mandela; it treats of Mandela in name only.  But it offers many opportunities for laughs at unexpected physical rudeness.  That all proceeds went not to the company or the theatre but to worthy charities added something to the evening too.

John P. Harvey

[L–R] Sam Campbell, Clyde Rathbone, Anna Keenan, Mike Nayna, Bernard Armstrong, Luke Rathbone, and Rory Rathbone, in It’s Me… Mandela.  Photographer: Charles Lowthian.