Questions of crisis spiral in Sami Ibrahim’s thoughtful but strangely paced play. There is the personal strife of mediator Nicki (Mariah Louca); the political disasters that joker Dan (Peter Corboy) can’t tear his eyes from in the news; and the crisis of care that threatens to ruin the reputation of the organisation for which the four characters work. In a bland meeting room, this group of medical staff is training to offer humanitarian aid in war zones. But how can they expect to manage around active conflict if they can barely survive a few weeks together in peace?
Jaz Woodcock-Stewart’s production has short, fragmentary scenes, headache-inducing beats and snippets of hypothetical situations in which the participants are pushed closer to admitting they can’t handle what they have signed up for. These conversations get deep quickly, but it’s the lighter, incidental chats during the breaks that reveal most about their characters, as grieving Khaled (Luca Kamleh Chapman) and fixer-upper Sarah (Rosa Robson) grow closer, and Dan – unfairly picked on by the others – accidentally learns about Nicki’s troubles. These soft moments of connection are gracefully done; tiny glances of awkwardness, little seeds of growing trust.
Gently, lines between theory and actuality blur, with the characters slipping into the roles on their little laminated cards and getting stuck. The way the text drifts is dark and engaging, but the direction is too rooted in the training centre’s hard-edged room to transport us elsewhere. The cast wield live-feed cameras, symbols of intense scrutiny, but the TVs they are displayed on are too small to be affecting.
The over long second half gets distracted by its own tangents, centring Khaled and Sarah’s relationship as the softened focus around reality seeps into a lack of certainty in the storytelling. But throughout, desperate, thorny questions of purpose and duty arise, of how to prioritise in impossible situations. As their power structures shift, the reality of conflict closing in, the play asks how much it would take for a well-intentioned person to lean into a little corruption. Don’t even the best of us, it asks, have a price they would fall for?
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