MANNA from HEAVEN
A missionary’s culture clash in colonial Africa is utterly spellbinding
COLONiaLiSM is one of the most vexed issues of our times. if you throw God into the mix, you can really stir things up.
But what i loved about Danai Gurira’s play, set during the 1890s in what is now Zimbabwe, is that in the end it also achieves something transcendental.
First seen in the U.S. in 2012, Gurira’s story is about a young black Catholic called Chilford who saves a young woman from an arranged marriage.
The girl is the niece of his maid, who secretly practises the traditional religion of her Shona tribe.
Outside their home, trouble is brewing, with attacks on black collaborators known as ‘bafu’ (meaning ‘traitor’ in Shona). after a fatal scuffle, the girl is forced to choose between her people and her Catholic faith.
The big question posed by Gurira’s compelling and intense play is expressed by the maid: ‘What is wrong with our ways?’
it’s a subject that goes to the heart of our understanding of cultural identity, economic development and whether one way of life can ever be set above another.
The language is uncompromising, with the missionary reviling his fellow africans as ‘savages’. But there is innocence and humour about the writing, too, with English phrases mutating into local forms, echoing the effects of colonisation.
Ola ince’s solemn yet vital and emotional production distils all this, and more, into a spellbinding two hours and 40 minutes, with two short intervals.
and Naomi Dawson’s stage design, with a central concrete arena set with European furniture surrounded by red cracked earth — all under a crucifix provocatively bearing a conspicuously white Jesus — highlights the divisions on show.
it’s a fine play for two reasons. One is that it is potently tragic, hingeing on a hard-won and deeply moving act of forgiveness at the end. The other is that it has terrific parts for actors. Paapa Essiedu is taut with uncertainty throughout as the strict, chaste Chilford.
He is offset by Pamela Nomvete as his insubordinate maid, and Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo as a social climber speaking the Queen’s English.
But it’s Letitia Wright who is the play’s dramatic engine, transforming from nervy tribesgirl to confident young Christian woman, determined to hold together her past and her present.
Unsurprisingly, it is selling out on the South Bank, but this is a serious piece of work which deserves a run in the West End. Catch it there if it transfers.
SOME of the acting in Selina Cadell’s revival of William Congreve’s comedy of manners The Double Dealer is so oversized it may be observable from space.
But the biggest challenge facing anyone who takes on the convoluted antics of Congreve’s scheming characters is to make sense of all their silliness. Here we have Mellefont (Lloyd Everitt) who means to marry Cynthia (Zoe Waites), but finds himself undermined by dastardly buddy Maskwell (Edward MacLiam). None of it is subtle, certainly, but as a twoand-a-half-hour romp through a gallery of reliable Restoration Comedy grotesques, it’s good hearty fare.