Anthony Morris’s thoughtful but frustratingly dense look at prejudice and failure begins with its protagonist, Fidel, rifling through old gas bills and job rejection letters. He’s looking for his old school diaries. When he finds them, they tell the story of a child who’s told to aim lower, not higher.
Actor Anthony Ofoegbu shifts with impressive nimbleness between a browbeaten middle-aged man and the energetic child who pipes up that he has to be “10 times better” than his white classmates to succeed. But even his energy and commitment can’t make this swirling, repetitive Young Vic production sing.
The same words that fill the air are written on the floor of the stage, as though on a blackboard. Often, they’re intoned again and again: in one overused device, Ofoegbu says the same phrase repeatedly, his intonation more anguished each time. It is presumably designed to show how the things that prejudiced adults say to kids stick with them, reverberating through their whole lives: “No more lofty ideas,” Fidel is told, despite his exceptional academic results. But it also makes this production feel thin and repetitive, its thesis undersketched.
Conundrum pays careful attention to the past but neglects the present. It’s clear that Fidel didn’t achieve the glittering career he deserved to have, but it’s not clear who he did become, or what other consolations life might have brought him.
Conundrum is largely a monologue that circles, with the insistence of a psychotherapist, around childhood, its verbal interrogations intercut with moments of movement and mime that leave Ofoegbu bathed in sweat and tears. But a few cryptic scenes with a health professional gesture at what Fidel’s present might look like, as a white-coated man enters and tries to force him to take medication. It feels hackneyed. This production focuses on deeply felt emotions over context, but that means that, ironically for a production that takes self-examination as its subject, there’s not always room for psychological nuance.
Still, Conundrum does shine a light on the flawed ideal of social mobility through education. It’s often obscure, but what cries out from its depths is pain at the way a promise that’s written in school reports is broken, again and again, by the world beyond.
‘Conundrum’ runs at the Young Vic until 4 February
