Marys Seacole

by Jackie Sibblies Drury

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 28 April 2022

Nadia Latif directs Déja J. Bowens, Llewella Gideon, Kayla Meikle, Esther Smith, Olivia Williams and Susan Wooldridge in Jackie Sibblies Drury's new play Marys Seacole which investigates not only the career of the original Mary Seacole, a Jamaican who travelled to the Crimea in the 1850s to provide nursing assistance during the war (where she was rebuffed by Florence Nightingale), but also the wider experience of coloured people as carers and medical staff in the modern world.

In a verstile set designed by Tom Scutt we are sometimes in an NHS ward, sometimes in an anonymous park, sometimes in Jamaica, sometimes in the Crimea, and sometimes apparently in the dark recesses of the mind of the generic 'Mary' (Kayla Meikle). The transitions are often abrupt, and the play suffers from becoming too like a series of vignettes none of which have sufficient time to develop into truly engrossing drama. Everything becomes subsumed in the overarching theme of twisted mother-daughter relationships and general racial prejudice, with the individual stories never adequately resolved.

The opening, which gives the impression of being a prologue to a play focussed on Mary Seacole, turns out to be a monologue in which episodes which could have formed the following scenes turn out to be only told to us. The scene in a modern hosptial or care home which follows sets up all sorts of tensions between three generations (a resident, daughter and gradndaughter), and adds the unpleasantness of barely concealed racism towards the staff, but fades from our attention as other matters are addressed. An almost phantasmagoric scene in which broken soldiers lie scattered across the floor while fragments of the dialogue in earlier scenes jostle with each other at shouting pitch gives an alarming impression of a mind in turmoil and stress, but at the cost of wearing down the audience with relentless noise.

All in all, I was not particularly satisfied with this production. After the glorious dramatic coherence of The Corn is Green seeen a few days earlier, on this occasion I felt I was too often present at a hectoring lecture rather than a truly developed play.