Marys Seacole at the Donmar Warehouse review: Dazed and confused
Mary Seacole, a British-Jamaican nurse who, among other endeavours, cared for wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War, has only recently been given the recognition she deserves.
With her new play, Sibblies Drury transcends the single history of Mary Seacole, and presents us with a number of Marys, across various time periods and settings. Mary is at once a care home nurse in modern Britain and a children’s nanny in contemporary America; she is an hotelier in 1800s Jamaica and a nurse on a Victorian battlefront.
Much like the writer’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning Fairview, Marys Seacole is a surprising and distinct piece that places race under a magnifying glass. The Marys across the ages are all black care-giving women looking after white people, with the time-hopping narrative serving to highlight the persistent racial imbalances in the care system. “Them need us but them don’t want us”, Mary’s mother surmises. Mary, though, wants and needs to care for all. She is a strong, pioneering woman who stands fearlessly in the face of racial injustice. “I give power to myself”, she says resolutely.
This determination and spirit are captured marvellously by Kayla Meikle, who puts her whole heart into her multifarious Marys. Along with her confidante Mamie, played by Déja J. Bowens in an impressive professional stage debut, the pair’s exchanges make for compulsive viewing as they converse humorously and naturally in quip-laden dialogue, delivered in rolling Jamaican dialect.
Unfortunately, the casts’ contributions are eclipsed by the chaos into which the play eventually descends. As the production progresses, the action becomes increasingly tricky to decipher. The many thematic strands – race, womanhood, mother-daughter relationships, home and belonging – coalesce in a final fever dream-like sequence that neither satisfyingly draws the pieces together, nor affects much feeling other than bewilderment. There is an overwrought attempt at a conclusion as inventive and conscience-stirring as that of Fairview, but instead the casts’ final moments on stage teeter precariously on the downright bizarre.
For a woman whose name was once lost to the mists of time, this play tries to reignite the memory of Mary Seacole and allow her to speak for the Marys of today. Alas this confused production may well be remembered for other reasons.