Danai Gurira started this year as an obscure (in Britain) actor-playwright and ended it as a very successful actor-playwright. A lot of this is down to a film you may have heard of called ‘Black Panther’, in which she starred as the hard-as-nails Wakanda warrior Okoye, a role she reprised in ‘Avengers: Infinity War’.
But a UK breakthrough for her writing was surely always a question of when not if: her plays ‘Eclipsed’ and ‘The Convert’ have already run to massive acclaim off-West End. Scarcely a year after the latter premiered in the tiny Gate Theatre, it gets the large-scale revival it deserves as part of Kwame Kwei-Armah’s debut Young Vic season.
Set in colonial Zimbabwe (Harare when it was called Salisbury), with an all-black cast, ‘The Convert’ is a meticulous, gripping and emotionally devastating drama about the colonisation of the mind, in which the invading whites remain a palpable but unseen presence.
The action takes place in the household of Paapa Essiedu’s fastidious, uptight Chilford. He has lived among the British since a boy, and has fully embraced their lofty cultural rhetoric and benign deity. Clad in a natty suit and speaking only English, he aspires to be the perfect gentleman, but there is something innately crushed about his whole demeanour.
As the play opens, he is persuaded to take on a young woman, Jekesai, soon redubbed Ester (fellow ‘Black Panther’ star Letitia Wright). Initially completely unversed in either English language or culture, she proves to be something of a prodigy, who rapidly forsakes her native tongue and absorbs virtually the entire Bible within a few weeks. But is this an awakening? Or just brainwashing?
In Ola Ince’s brooding, well-judged production, with an in-the-round set from Naomi Dawson in which semi-opaque walls fall like shadows of the mind, ‘The Convert’ charts a steady decline in what at first appears to be a settled order. At the beginning, Chilford is certain he is doing the right thing and on the right side of history. In the second part, the shallow foundations of this world start to shake after his dissolute best friend Chancellor (an enjoyable Ivanno Jeremiah) is murdered in a clash with locals angry at the British. In the third, everything starts to crumble.
A really great thing about Gurira’s writing is how she combines a sturdy and gripping three-act plot that could come from a Hollywood movie with a level of detail and characterisation that takes things way beyond that. The play is fascinating in its articulation of how religion is a tool of empire: tribal loyalties, family bonds, language and culture are all sacrificed to a strange god whose noble ideals are absolutely ignored by the invaders who imported him.
The direction of the story takes is perhaps not hard to guess, but the character arcs are. Perhaps the most fascinating character is Chancellor’s fiancée, Prudence (Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo). Almost absurdly posh – posher than the colonial soldiers, she notes – at first she seems to be a grotesque parody of an Anglophobe. In fact, it becomes apparent when she is finally left alone with Ester that she is anything but: her piercing intelligence lets her see everyone for who they are, not least the British.
It’s Essiedu and Wright whose performances linger the most, though. He is brilliant as a clever and nervous man, quite possibly gay, desperately searching for belonging via imported ideals that he’s always secretly known are a sham. And Wright is great as a woman too young and naive to suspect the charade: she gulps down the Kool-Aid of the British and their god; when her illusions are finally shattered, she brings it back up with a (literal) vengeance.
One clever details is that it’s not obvious who the convert is, or what conversion is being referred to. There are several to choose from, in a play that perhaps subtly aims to be its own call to conversion, querying the submersion of African culture and identity within the West. Whatever the case, ‘The Convert’ is a really great play, and it’s wonderful it’s back with us so soon, on such a scale, and done so well – it is surely not too much to hope that a large-scale revival of ‘Eclipsed’ might be on its heels, continuing Gurira’s roll.
But a UK breakthrough for her writing was surely always a question of when not if: her plays ‘Eclipsed’ and ‘The Convert’ have already run to massive acclaim off-West End. Scarcely a year after the latter premiered in the tiny Gate Theatre, it gets the large-scale revival it deserves as part of Kwame Kwei-Armah’s debut Young Vic season.
Set in colonial Zimbabwe (Harare when it was called Salisbury), with an all-black cast, ‘The Convert’ is a meticulous, gripping and emotionally devastating drama about the colonisation of the mind, in which the invading whites remain a palpable but unseen presence.
The action takes place in the household of Paapa Essiedu’s fastidious, uptight Chilford. He has lived among the British since a boy, and has fully embraced their lofty cultural rhetoric and benign deity. Clad in a natty suit and speaking only English, he aspires to be the perfect gentleman, but there is something innately crushed about his whole demeanour.
As the play opens, he is persuaded to take on a young woman, Jekesai, soon redubbed Ester (fellow ‘Black Panther’ star Letitia Wright). Initially completely unversed in either English language or culture, she proves to be something of a prodigy, who rapidly forsakes her native tongue and absorbs virtually the entire Bible within a few weeks. But is this an awakening? Or just brainwashing?
In Ola Ince’s brooding, well-judged production, with an in-the-round set from Naomi Dawson in which semi-opaque walls fall like shadows of the mind, ‘The Convert’ charts a steady decline in what at first appears to be a settled order. At the beginning, Chilford is certain he is doing the right thing and on the right side of history. In the second part, the shallow foundations of this world start to shake after his dissolute best friend Chancellor (an enjoyable Ivanno Jeremiah) is murdered in a clash with locals angry at the British. In the third, everything starts to crumble.
A really great thing about Gurira’s writing is how she combines a sturdy and gripping three-act plot that could come from a Hollywood movie with a level of detail and characterisation that takes things way beyond that. The play is fascinating in its articulation of how religion is a tool of empire: tribal loyalties, family bonds, language and culture are all sacrificed to a strange god whose noble ideals are absolutely ignored by the invaders who imported him.
The direction of the story takes is perhaps not hard to guess, but the character arcs are. Perhaps the most fascinating character is Chancellor’s fiancée, Prudence (Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo). Almost absurdly posh – posher than the colonial soldiers, she notes – at first she seems to be a grotesque parody of an Anglophobe. In fact, it becomes apparent when she is finally left alone with Ester that she is anything but: her piercing intelligence lets her see everyone for who they are, not least the British.
It’s Essiedu and Wright whose performances linger the most, though. He is brilliant as a clever and nervous man, quite possibly gay, desperately searching for belonging via imported ideals that he’s always secretly known are a sham. And Wright is great as a woman too young and naive to suspect the charade: she gulps down the Kool-Aid of the British and their god; when her illusions are finally shattered, she brings it back up with a (literal) vengeance.
One clever details is that it’s not obvious who the convert is, or what conversion is being referred to. There are several to choose from, in a play that perhaps subtly aims to be its own call to conversion, querying the submersion of African culture and identity within the West. Whatever the case, ‘The Convert’ is a really great play, and it’s wonderful it’s back with us so soon, on such a scale, and done so well – it is surely not too much to hope that a large-scale revival of ‘Eclipsed’ might be on its heels, continuing Gurira’s roll.