Generations of carers with the right to nurse a grudge
Marys Seacole (Donmar) Verdict: Hail Mary ★★✩✩✩
A LONG, naturalistic scene in Marys Seacole has two black nurses chattering in Jamaican patois as they tenderly give a bed-bath to an elderly white woman who has soiled herself. A first in the theatre for me, and a humbling lesson.
Pulitzer-winning Jackie Sibblies Drury’s play begins as a biography of Mary Seacole, the real-life Creole ‘doctress’ who set up a boarding house to nurse cholera victims in Kingston, and then wounded soldiers in the Crimean War.
In front of a green screen suggesting tenting and surgical scrubs, a proud Mary introduces herself as the bold adventurer she was.
Disrobed of her Victorian corset and full skirt, she becomes a present-day Mary in a nurse’s uniform. The odd pluralisation of the Mary in the title suddenly makes sense. Drury is exploring what it is to be a female carer over the past two centuries. Her point is that the often unpaid or underpaid roles as carers — Marys — have fallen to women. A vast number of immigrants (‘They need us, they don’t want us,’ says a young Mary) from former British colonies are employed by the NHS and, like Mary Seacole, they feel downtrodden, dehumanised, underappreciated and angry.
But there is too much telling and too little showing as three generations of black women carers and cared-for white women play various versions of themselves.
In one scene, Olivia Williams is a frazzled mother who has put her dying mum into care then snaps at a black nurse not to forget her mother is a person. Later, as a snootily superior Florence Nightingale, she refuses Seacole’s offer to care for patients in the Crimea.
The play resonates with echoes of plays by Caryl Churchill (time travel) and Sarah Kane (brutality, despair) as historical scenes of bleeding corpses in Crimea blend into contemporary images of war-torn Ukraine.
As Mary, a volcanic Kayla Meikle exudes anger and hurt like molten lava. But overall, a sharper focus would have better served Seacole’s remarkable story.