★★★☆☆
The modern slang term is “coconut” – an abusive term for someone you accuse of betraying their race by being dark on the outside but white on the inside. In 1890s southern Africa, according to this new play by the Zimbabwean-American playwright Danai Gurira, it was “Bafu”. It was an insult that, as the area that would later become Rhodesia struggled between African tradition and Western impositions, could get you killed.
Gurira sets her play in the home of Chilford, a teacher in his thirties who has converted to Christianity. The son of a witch doctor, he is now more British than the British, dressing in a frock coat, mangling refined phrases. Yet the central character is really his servant Jekesai, the 19-year-old who changes her name to Ester and must talk in English and change her faith to get the job.
The way they all find themselves on the cusp of two cultures will eventually come to the boil as rebels target Bafus. Gurira, though, keeps her characters at a steady simmer for a long time before that. An actor as well as a playwright — she plays Michonne in the zombie TV series The Walking Dead — she is better at elegant dialogues that set out the characters’ situations one by one than she is at condensing all these rich issues into one streamlined plot. At two and a half hours, the play needs condensing.
That might be more of a problem if Christopher Haydon’s production were not as intense as it is, played out on a set by Rosie Elnile that backs its Victorian living room with a mound of red earth and a giant cross. As Ester, Mimi Ndiweni gives a star-making performance. She nails Ester’s smiling decorum and the freer impulses she has to squash, without caricaturing either extreme. She makes us believe entirely in Ester’s divided loyalties, that her conversion is both a necessary evil and also a sincerely held belief.
There are fine performances too from Stefan Adegbola as the buttoned-up Chilford; Richard Pepple as his genial friend Chancellor, whose conversion is more blatantly strategic; Joan Iyiola as his Anglocentric girlfriend, Prudence; and Clare Perkins as the playfully but persistently traditional servant Mai Tamba. The details here are divine, but Gurira needs to move faster to the meat of her story.
Box office: 020 7229 0706, to February 11