A evaluate by Dominic Maxwell for The Occasions of London.
Is that this simply your common informative bioplay? It scarcely appears potential from Jackie Sibblies Drury, the American playwright who blended the playful with the pointed to Pulitzer prizewinning impact in her earlier play, Fairview, successful pre-pandemic on the Younger Vic. But right here stands Kayla Meikle because the Nineteenth-century Scottish-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, alone on stage in entrance of the inexperienced canvas backdrop of Tom Scutt’s elegant design, working down the important thing details of her historical past, together with becoming a member of Florence Nightingale (uninvited) to take care of the wounded within the Crimean Conflict. Afterward, certain sufficient, we see disembodied British troopers on a smoky battlefield and Nightingale herself, performed with Julie Andrews vim and vigour by Olivia Williams.
Drury not often sticks with the anticipated for lengthy, although. The title isn’t any typo: the well-known Mary morphs into a number of modern-day caregivers. Seacole’s black outfit is eliminated to disclose the blue costume of an NHS nurse under. Speak of cholera in 1850 blends right into a scene during which Mary takes care of a dying white girl whose fractious middle-class household undoubtedly love her, however aren’t those cleansing the shit from her bedclothes.
Mary will grow to be a New York nanny, too, mutely withstanding a frazzled white mum who enthuses in regards to the vegan ackee she had on vacation in Montego Bay. Or a seen-it-all-before nurse main an NHS training-day role-play session.
This kaleidoscopic play is by turns abstruse, amusing, irked, forgiving. Mom-daughter relationships dominate, but it surely’s solely when the lurking ghost of Mary’s disapproving mom (Llewella Gideon) breaks her silence that the present’s concepts in regards to the underestimated position of the black caregiver in white society grow to be overt.
Disgrace, right here, that Drury overplays her hand by getting characters to reprise key strains as if this have been the finale of some kind of psychedelic idea album. The night goes from being one step forward of its viewers to labouring its level. That apart, there’s a lot to love right here, not least a staggeringly good central flip from Meikle, who lends Mary an unforced watchfulness, grace and grit. It’s a loving efficiency however by no means a sentimental one. And although Mary has to have the endurance of a saint in all her guises, Drury presents sharp character sketches of girls who’re neither sanctified nor hopeless sinners.
Not every thing in Nadia Latif’s elegant, acerbic, fantastically acted manufacturing fairly joins up. Is its unusual form, led by theme relatively than narrative, a tribute to a lady who wouldn’t be contained by the traditional methods of considering of her age? It feels as if Drury is a draft away from discovering the proper technique to make Seacole’s story each literal and metaphorical in the best way she needs to, however that is an formidable night that lingers within the reminiscence even so.
To June 4, donmarwarehouse.com