Anthony Ofoegbu
(Picture: Marc Brenner)Great performance, shame about the script. In this 75-minute near-monologue, written and directed by Paul Anthony Morris for his company Crying in the Wilderness, Anthony Ofoegbu gives a visceral rendition of Fidel Robinson, a distraught, middle-aged black man wrestling with past and current pain. Organic and apparently deeply personal, it’s also a frustratingly oblique, naggingly repetitive tale that requires the audience to fill in a huge amount of the story through inference or deduction.
We first see Fidel shredding his starry exam results from 1982, along with subsequent rejection letters claiming he is overqualified for jobs as a pharmacist or lab assistant. He repeatedly spells out and defines biological terms like oesophagus and hypothalamus, a child showing off in an open schoolroom, alongside the withering putdowns of teachers: “No more lofty ideas!” “You didn’t win.” And the incantation that he has to be “ten times smarter” than his white contemporaries.
