While training to provide humanitarian aid in an unnamed warzone, the personal becomes political in this mind-bending, reality-blending play.
In Sami Ibrahim’s new play, directed by Olivier award-winning director Jaz Woodcock-Stewart, three Westerners prepare to provide humanitarian aid in an active warzone. While the location of the warzone itself is unspecified, it is implied to be in the broader area of North Africa / the Middle East. Set in the training centre, Nicki (Mariah Louca) is the stoic, curt facilitator, pushing the students through role-playing scenarios to face the thorny, uncomfortable challenges that await them in their future work. The students, brooding Khaled (Luca Kamleh Chapman), empathetic Sarah (Rosa Robson), and funny-guy Dan (Peter Croboy) grapple with these simulations, finding themselves flustered and frustrated. Questions posed by the training bleed into their own lives, and the political becomes extraordinarily personal in ways wholly unexpected. Short, fragmented scenes speed us through the first half, leading up to a surprisingly more elongated shape of the second act of the show. The participants find themselves falling, almost helplessly, into the world of their role-plays. As the scenes become longer, so the line between reality and fiction, between here and there, begins to blur. Simulations are literally zoomed into by way of a handheld camera – a device that seeks to show us the intense examination the subjects are under, creating dimension in an otherwise restrictive set. The camera becomes our eye as the audience, and the more we view through this new lens, the more reality becomes blurred.
The most compelling performances happen outside of these role-plays. The soft moments of tenderness between characters when they think themselves to be alone are touching. While it is natural to become absorbed by the horrors of an active warzone, our attention is diverted to the many ways in which these characters’ lives are coloured outside of their training. As we begin to understand why they are there, what their intentions are of going to provide humanitarian aid, it becomes unclear if they themselves are certain. The concerns of white saviorism flow in and out of the discourse and Khaled’s “unique position” is propped up into a somewhat uncomfortable light. The participants try to tread around identity politics and underlying morality, while simultaneously being forced to reckon with the coming crises of morality they might face while providing aid.
Multiple Casualty Incident does not shy away from the disconcerting questions Western humanitarian aid offers in places of crises. Euphemisms abound, they delineation of what is right and what is wrong is investigated with a kind of clarity that makes the concept ever more complicated.