Stage This article is more than 5 years oldReviewThe Convert review – thrilling and troubling war of words
This article is more than 5 years oldYoung Vic Theatre, London
Paapa Essiedu and Black Panther’s Letitia Wright are captivating in Danai Gurira’s story of religious and linguistic colonialism
English-speaking missionaries in 19th-century Africa targeted the tongues of the native population in two ways: training them to speak Queen Victoria’s language and take the wafers of the Christian eucharist.
These are the aims of Chilford, the central character in the American-Zimbabwean dramatist Danai Gurira’s 2012 play The Convert, which begins in 1895 in Southern Africa Mashonaland, soon renamed Southern Rhodesia, then later Zimbabwe.
While linguistic and religious colonialism has frequently been treated in fiction and non-fiction, Gurira gives the situation a fascinating double twist. The faith that Chilford evangelises is not Anglicanism but Catholicism. It is a creed often suspicious to the English establishment, who, in one of the play’s subtle topical shivers, viewed Catholic teaching as a form of what is now called “radicalisation”. And, crucially, Chilford’s birth name is Ndovlu.
Recruited from his ancestor-worshipping tribe by Jesuits at the age of nine, he is now the only African serving in the mission. The play’s title, then, might refer equally to him or to Jekesai, the young servant whom he renames Ester and teaches Christian prayers and hymns.
Gurira has acknowledged Shaw’s Pygmalion as her inspiration, but the stakes here are higher than access to Ascot. With rising indigenous resistance to the British South Africa Company, effectively the area’s government, Chilford and Ester may be risking their lives by their re-education.
The script is striking for its smooth and nuanced movement between forms of speech. The play begins and ends with untranslated conversation in a Shona dialect. Chilford pompously orates a heavily accented English, which he regards as a mark of superiority, but his speech is pocked with small idiomatic mistakes, such as “bag of mixtures” for “mixed bag”. Prudence, a native social climber, has copied the colonisers’ accent so perfectly that she could play Lady Bracknell.
Moments when Chilford, Prudence or Jekesai/Ester switch from their imposed vocabulary to Shona have extraordinary force. These are moments in which, as in Brian Friel’s Translations, we somehow understand words we don’t know. And the English dialogue reverberates with two pejorative terms: bafu, used by native people to denigrate those who have taken the Victorian shilling, and “savage”, shockingly used by socially climbed Africans about those they left.
This war of words is thrillingly performed by a cast of seven under Ola Ince’s direction that incrementally builds tension and complexity. Paapa Essiedu, brilliantly versatile in four small roles in the recent Pinter One, is toweringly powerful as Chilford. Precisely calibrating the affectations and unknowing slips of his Queen’s English, he also makes the case, to an audience likely to despise the man as a race traitor, that conversion may have been Chilford’s only way of fulfilling his gifts. As Jekesai/Ester, Letitia Wright also embodies the push and pull between who she is and what she might advantageously become, her speech and body language audibly and visibly maturing through the three-hour production.
UK-premiered two years ago in Christopher Haydon’s sharp staging at the Gate, The Convert is shown, thanks to the greater space and budget of the Young Vic, to be a work considering questions of racial, political and religious identity and assimilation with a provocative intelligence that is – appropriately given the text with which it plays – Shavian.
At the Young Vic, London, until 26 January.
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