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.

Uncle Vanya

by Anton Chekhov

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 5 March 2016

Chekhov's play has been adapted by the director Robert Icke so that its setting is less obviously Russian (Vanya is 'Uncle Johnnie') and also later than the nineteenth century (there is a telephone, and electric light in the house). It features Paul Rhys as John (Vanya), Jessica Brown Findlay as Sonya, Tobias Menzies as Michael (Astrov, the doctor), and Susan Wooldridge as Maria (John's mother and Sonya's grandmother), with Hilton McRae as Alexander (the professor) and Vanessa Kirby as his second wife Elena, Richard Lumsden as Cartwright (Telyeghin) and Ann Queensberry as the nanny. The production is designed by Hildegard Bechtler.

On a raised platform of wooden boards, with posts at each corner supporting a black roof or canopy, there are a few props, and an old nanny and a visiting doctor. Conversation is desultory, the old woman offering tea and complaining about the disruption to the routines of the household, the doctor absorbed with signs of his slow disintegration into mediocrity. Slowly, the whole platform revolves, while a neighbour and the members of an ill-assorted family appear and disappear. The management of the estate, which normally occupies Sonya and her uncle Johnnie, has lapsed during the visit of Sonya's father and stepmother who seem to have exerted a fatal lassitude simply by being there, city folk ill at ease in the country. But John is attracted to Elena, his brother-in-law's new wife (Sonya's mother was his sister), and this adds to the simmering tensions.