Questions of disaster spiral in Sami Ibrahim’s considerate however unusually paced play. There’s the private strife of mediator Nicki (Mariah Louca); the political disasters that joker Dan (Peter Corboy) can’t tear his eyes from within the information; and the disaster of care that threatens to damage the status of the organisation for which the 4 characters work. In a bland assembly room, this group of medical employees is coaching to supply humanitarian support in warfare zones. However how can they anticipate to handle round lively battle if they’ll barely survive a number of weeks collectively in peace?
Jaz Woodcock-Stewart’s manufacturing has brief, fragmentary scenes, headache-inducing beats and snippets of hypothetical conditions wherein the members are pushed nearer to admitting they’ll’t deal with what they’ve signed up for. These conversations get deep rapidly, however it’s the lighter, incidental chats through the breaks that reveal most about their characters, as grieving Khaled (Luca Kamleh Chapman) and fixer-upper Sarah (Rosa Robson) develop nearer, and Dan – unfairly picked on by the others – by chance learns about Nicki’s troubles. These gentle moments of connection are gracefully achieved; tiny glances of awkwardness, little seeds of rising belief.
Gently, strains between concept and actuality blur, with the characters slipping into the roles on their little laminated playing cards and getting caught. The best way the textual content drifts is darkish and fascinating, however the path is just too rooted within the coaching centre’s hard-edged room to move us elsewhere. The forged wield live-feed cameras, symbols of intense scrutiny, however the TVs they’re displayed on are too small to be affecting.
The over lengthy second half will get distracted by its personal tangents, centring Khaled and Sarah’s relationship because the softened focus round actuality seeps into a scarcity of certainty within the storytelling. However all through, determined, thorny questions of objective and obligation come up, of methods to prioritise in inconceivable conditions. As their energy constructions shift, the truth of battle closing in, the play asks how a lot it might take for a well-intentioned particular person to lean into somewhat corruption. Don’t even one of the best of us, it asks, have a worth they might fall for?
