Angry diatribes and amusing pranks: Donmar Warehouse’s Marys Seacole reviewed

The title of the Donmar’s new effort, Marys Seacole, appears to be a misprint and that makes the reader look twice. Good marketing. The show is a blend of Spike Milligan-esque sketches and indignant speeches about race but it starts as a straightforward historical narrative. Mary Seacole enters in Victorian garb and introduces herself as a woman of half-Scots and half-Caribbean heritage who believes that ethnic differences create hierarchies of competence. Her veins, she says, flow with ‘Scotch blood’ and this gives her an entrepreneurial advantage over her ‘indolent’ Caribbean neighbours. Inflammatory stuff. If a white author embraced that supremacist creed, there’d be outrage.

After the history lesson, the scene switches to a modern London hospital where an old dear lies in intensive care surrounded by family members. Her mischievous granddaughter decides to enact a mercy killing, for fun. She switches off Granny’s artificial respirator. Whereupon the old dear springs back to life. That’s hilarious, and it stands as a perfect metaphor for the NHS: if we unplug it, it may stop killing us.

Next we’re in Central Park where a stressed-out mom cares for an errant toddler while trying to make a vital business call to an important client. This small scene is brilliantly observed and Olivia Williams gets huge laughs playing the fretful mom. She’s the nearest thing the English stage has to Katharine Hepburn and she deserves better material than this confused historical cabaret. The script suffers another attack of wanderlust and relocates to Jamaica in the 19th century where Mary Seacole has opened an upmarket hotel. Waitresses serve mugs of rum to a posh English guest (Olivia Williams again), who pretends to dislike alcohol while discreetly asking for multiple top-ups and getting hammered. A funny skit, superbly done. What else is on offer? Arid chunks of dialogue between two black childminders in New York, and a lengthy hospital scene where Jamaican nurses prattle about husbands, marriage and kids.