Review: Convo, Theatre Peckham

Theatre Peckham presents a new play by Malachi Antonia, who also produces and acts in the production – a prodigious talent. The play is simply staged with emotional fluency as scenes glide from one to another. They are punctuated with an alarming screeching note and a clever repetition of lines that pushes us away and draws us in at the same time. It is an engaging moment to break the fourth wall, and as the character rises from the audience, we have the feeling of an everyman character.

Valerie Paul plays the mother with ease, delivering an unapologetic performance of parenthood. She is on the verge of a successful self-help book launch about parenting. Her book explains the virtues of tough love, professing that mothers understand that ‘love is not always soft’. As a single black mother building a successful career, she makes no apologies for carving out a life for herself and her children. Any sense of remorse for parental failings is not so evident. Church, prejudice, and personal experience inform the raising of her children. Here Antonia shines a light on intergenerational behaviours that do no one any favours as they wreak emotional havoc; ‘creating loss, with silence over collapse, endurance, and control over love’. 

This mother sees that a sensitive black boy must toughen up to survive. Sexual orientation, parental guidance or personal fulfilment are unaffordable luxuries. When her son powerfully says, ’I’m enough’, we appreciate the emotional exile he felt as a young, vulnerable teenager, where ‘there was no safe place to land’. Both mother and absent father have let him down, and his choices of alternative emotional refuge were not always wise ones.

Antonia plays the son with a sensitivity that has strength and confidence as he, without overindulging, voices his hurt and disappointment. Convo confronts various levels of abuse with subtlety, referencing moments of physical, verbal, and sexual abuse without an overt sense of drama. This is to the play’s advantage, as it allows us to focus on the man’s strength as he confidently identifies his persona while shining a light on the failed parenting skills of the now-famous writer on family matters. ‘Don’t write me wrong again’ is a powerful demand from the son.

Convo is a short, pithy play that is thought-provoking as it challenges ideas of family life and how best to navigate it. Closing up emotionally is to be avoided, and having a valued relationship with a son has to be earned. But as the clash of parent and child concludes, we have some feeling of optimism as mother cannot call him ‘son’ – yet – but maybe, just maybe….

The one-act play feels as if it is part of something more substantial. It is called Convo, and there is a feeling that there is much more conversation to be had. Let’s hope there is a part two soon.

Malachi Antonio – Writer & Producer
Julie Saunders – Director

Convo plays at Peckham Theatre until Friday May 22 as part of Peckham Fringe