This masterfully layered new play by Sami Ibrahim explodes the ethical fissures of overseas aid work, exploring the gap between intention and consequence, between the offer of vital help and detached white saviour-ism, and between empathetic connections and coercive abuses of power.
We meet a group of trainees preparing for work which can barely be prepared for. It’s the start of Week 2, in which they move from theory to practice, working through scenarios from pre-written cards and testing out strategies for negotiation, crisis management and care through role play. Ibrahim quickly plunges the characters into moral and logistical dilemmas. We share in their uncertainty when asked whether to disclose private medical details for the (potentially) greater good of a patient’s welfare, or whether to bribe a guard to allow the import of medical supplies across a border. We wonder with the characters what the secret is, what the magic words that will defuse a situation or yield an advantage would be. Yet the restless structure repeatedly shifts away, into semi-blackouts, scene changes, and the driving beats of Josh Anio Grigg’s compelling sound design. The production thus underscores the folly of believing in anything as simple or straightforward as an answer.
The play’s first half reminded me of Annie Baker’s The Antipodes, sharing its focus on characters imagining a hostile elsewhere from the confines of one room, the fissures and power dynamics that fizzle within a group at work, and the search for ‘success’ in a context where it is abstract, contingent, and ambiguous. Rosie Elnile’s set holds these tensions beautifully, evoking the humdrum incongruity of a drab meeting room in a way that is never visually dull. There are plasticky stacking chairs, scratched blue walls, a small sign above the hot drinks table with pictures of idyllic mountains reminding everyone to please wash up their mugs. This visual utopian cliché peels off the wall in a room in which they imagine somewhere much more desperate, in a bid to make the real world better.
The play’s centres on a developing romance between Khaled (Luca Kamleh Chapman) and Sarah (Rosa Robson), both rocked by the stress of their coming work and by grief. Khaled sometimes struggles to confront charged topics given the relatively recent loss of his father, while Sarah later discloses her father’s death during her early childhood. Supporting characters are well served too. Fellow trainee Dan (Peter Corboy) begins with a hilarious uncouthness, and Sarah calls him out for his grating attempts at humour. Steadily though, his character attains greater sympathy; the idiosyncrasies Sarah finds unbearable are partially recast as misconceived attempts to bond with the group, blundering attempts at care. Meanwhile, course leader Nicki (Mariah Louca) balances work with caring for a sister recently diagnosed with MS. Chapman and Robson anchor the play with winning chemistry, capturing the glorious agonies of their characters’ misunderstandings and tensions. Corboy impresses with humour and subtlety, while Louca plays Nicki with an engaging brittleness, gradually shifting from someone seeking to maintain control and privacy to someone able to trust.
The ethics of overseas aid work are inherently under scrutiny, but Ibrahim also examines more extreme violations when specific accusations of abuse emerge, levelled against two senior members of their unnamed organisation, alleged to have demanded sex for medicine. Lisa, a trainee with them during Week 1 but never seen on stage, has quit, publicly condemning the organisation for its complicity. Further unsettled dilemmas are raised, and they rake over Lisa’s decision as a question of personal ethics (does she merely want to keep her conscience – and CV – clean) or an issue of collective culpability (are they legitimising the organisation with their continued presence).
Nonetheless, the characters proceed, their roleplays becoming more elaborate and complex. Soon, they become a vehicle for litigating interpersonal conflict. In character as a refugee seeking medical treatment, Dan needles Khaled for merely being a nurse and not a doctor (unlike Sarah). Yet they also become confessional spaces. Sarah divulges the death of her father while in role as aid worker ‘Laura’, such that Khaled does not initially realise what she is saying. The push and pull of roleplay fosters greater intimacy between the pair, yet holds them apart as they struggle to trust each other. In one charged moment, Laura refers to ‘my parents’ (plural), and Khaled begins to doubt her story, misconstruing her traumatic revelation as an extended fiction.
The ambivalent push-and-pull effect is mirrored in the play’s use of video. Introduced towards the end of the first half, live camera feeds become an essential part of the show’s grammar. The cameras’ diegetic function is never explained; perhaps the videos exist for posterity or for the purposes of assessment in the training programme, but their literal purpose needs no explanation. The conceit works terrifically well, a reinvigorating approach to an increasingly employed technique on London stages. The participants are scrutinised, the pressure dialling up as the watchful camera bears down on them. Yet Woodcock-Stewart’s staging, with much of centre stage obscured by television screens in the second half, relaying sometimes-oblique images, holds us at a deliberate distance while inviting us to peer closer. The screens inevitably signal the play’s thematic interest in voyeurism, but in Woodcock-Stewart’s hands the live feed takes on several different valences – tenderness, inquisitiveness, and subjectivity. The large televisions blow up intrusive closeups, while also shielding our view to give a sense of privacy.
The final stretches of the show, which use this device to full effect, include a dazzlingly written, stunningly executed sequence where the boundaries of reality, roleplay and fantasy blur. Throughout the earlier roleplays, Khaled has recurringly embodied Ali, a bullet-wounded refugee who has recently lost his father and is eagerly looking for work. Ibrahim rarely explains characters’ motivation, but it appears Khaled and Sarah have been using roleplays outside of the class as an experimental means to soothe Khaled’s grief. A turning point for them comes, later as Khaled tries to push her away emotionally, when Sarah calls Khaled ‘Ali’ by mistake. She is immediately apologetic, but the moment carries a frisson which neither character can resist. This initiates a sequence in which the previous unity of place dissolves. Instead, the scenes shift chimerically between settings, involving Dan and Nicki too; the characters seem simultaneously to be performing a training exercise getting out a hand, actually at work in the field, and also (in the case of Khaled and Sarah) engaged in an ambiguous sexual roleplay.
Ibrahim has spoken about the potential queasiness of putting a refugee camp onstage, noting that the seed of Multiple Casualty Incident came from seeking a new way for an audience to engage with refugee camps without a ‘too voyeuristic’ mode of representation. Represented on a stage in London, how can a world be evoked that is realistic, full, ethical, fair? Multiple Casualty Incident finds neat expression for these anxieties in the inherently theatrical nature of the characters’ rehearsal process. They make forms of theatre in the exercises, first stilted, halting, before bursting into a more urgent semblance of ‘real’-ness later on. Thus the play doubles as an ethical investigation of aid work and of theatre itself.
One way to conceive of theatre is as an act of preparation – a simulation of the world which readies us to go out into it and interact with it. It is a radical, activist, often-hopeful view of theatre, though is at danger of over-instrumentalising the form. The characters are playing at the role of aid worker in their training, but, as the play gently invites us to consider, this role always remains a performance, just with higher stakes, greater risk, and (hopefully, perhaps dubiously) more direct positive impact. The lack of answers to the exercises signals the messiness of a reality which cannot be reduced to a test.
The genius of Multiple Casualty Incident is the way it plays out miniature ethical crises that underpin all representation. Deliberately unspecific, the region in which the play’s humanitarian disaster is unfolding is inherently othered, and Ibrahim notes war-torn regions can have their cultural complexity telescoped down in the imagination. In a short scene early in the play, Dan offers misplaced condolences when news arrives of an incident with one hundred casualties in the same (unspecified) country as Khaled’s family. Khaled retorts that his family is from a different region, somewhere as remote from it as Dublin is from Norwich.
Though Multiple Casualty Incident collapses its walls of reality inward, Woodcock-Stewart and Ibrahim ensure that coherence triumphs over confusion, lucidly and movingly engaging with the stakes of incidents on every scale – interpersonal, romantic, workplace, geopolitical. In places, there are shades of the infamous (though highly inconclusive) Stanford Prison Guards experiment, with characters getting caught up within a monstrous fantasy. However, Ibrahim moves the play into far more interesting, morally ambivalent territory. There is something disconcertingly unethical about Khaled and Sarah’s fantasies, playing out against a backdrop of distant human suffering, yet the play lacks easy condemnation. The characters’ entanglements are simultaneously touching, grotesque and achingly human. Instead, it ambivalently questions the extent to which theatrical performance is the ‘empathy machine’ it is sometimes held up as. However much we might like theatre to be a tool to help us enrich our understanding of the world and of others, perhaps it mainly helps us to understand ourselves.
Photographs by Marc Brenner
Joshua Robey 