The Convert

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I want to report on The Convert before any more time passes, since it’s already been 3 days and 4 plays ago. It’s an intriguing new work by Danai Gurira (General Okoye in The Black Panther) and starring Letitia Wright (Shuri in The Black Panther). So Gurira is an actress and a playwright, though she dismisses the idea that they’re different professions. “It’s all storytelling,” she says.



The story, set in colonial Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe), explores the tensions between traditional culture and Christian missionary work, but with a twist. The man bringing Christianity to the people in this story is African, a convert himself to Christianity and to British ways.



The entire cast and creative team is black, as was a good proportion of the audience. (Paul thought he saw Chadwick Boseman, the Black Panther himself, in the audience the evening we went). White people are present in the imagination of the play, though we never see any. They are inescapably present in the lives of these people, in their conversations, in their aspirations and in their fears.



And they are suggested by the set as well. A white scrim boxes in the entire stage at the beginning of the play (presented in the round at the Young Vic), and the scrim rises and descends at critical moments throughout.



I tried, unsuccessfully, to find a copy of the script ahead of time. I was concerned—with reason, it turned out—that the dialogue might be hard to follow. All of it was delivered with what I take to be authentic accents of the period, and some of the dialogue is in Shona. I assume we’re not meant to understand the Shona, though it would have been helpful to have known some. Words such as “bafu”, which I gather means “traitor,” were liberally sprinkled in the English. The presentation in the round, too, made the show intimate, but difficult to follow when actors turned their backs.



The plot is, among other things, a reworking of Pygmalion. Here, Chilford, the African Christian, takes in Jekesai, a young woman escaping a polygamous marriage to an older man. Renamed Esther, she becomes his prize pupil in both English and Bible study. All goes predictably wrong, though not in the way of Shaw’s play, which I have never seen end with quite so much blood.



It’s a wonderfully complex play, one that avoids the easy path of simply vilifying European colonialism. Rather, we are given a whole range of African responses to it, from outright rejection to reluctant accommodation to self-serving appropriation of European ways. Chilford, in his somewhat pathetic attempt to be as British as the British themselves, refers to his own people as savages.



But in all this, Christianity is not only a means of colonial oppression, it can also be the means for Jekesai to escape the oppressive patriarchy of her own traditions. And she wonderfully exemplifies what Quakers praise as “primitive Christianity.” Part of the tragedy stems from her failure to see that European Christians of the 19^th century do not have her “primitive” understanding of Paul. She quotes Galatians back to Chilford in one puzzled moment, reminding him that there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus.



Perhaps the most intriguing character is the supporting figure of Prudence, a highly educated African woman who instructs Jekesai/Esther in the right way to serve tea but insists as well that she must remember her Shona language and traditions. Prudence is a quietly tragic figure for whom there is no place to use her talents. An ironic comment on the Pygmalion theme, perhaps, is that Prudence's English is far superior to Chilford's. Chilford is immensely proud of his learning, but his often awkward English is aspirational, not fluent. Gurira has taken care to distinguish different levels of competence in the language.



I thought Letitia Wright was charming in the Black Panther film. It turns out that she’s a very impressive actress on stage as well. She’s the kind of actress whose stillness commands attention. I look forward to seeing more of her.

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