The opening scene is set in Kingston, Jamaica where Mary (the wonderful Kayla Meikle) explains that her mother is Creole and her father is Scottish.   She attributes three qualities “energy, vivacity and vitality” to her mix of Creole and Scottish blood.  From her mother she has learnt the value of herbs in medicine to treat the outbreak of cholera in 1850s Jamaica.  

Off comes the Victorian frock and Mary is wearing a nurse’s blue uniform.  Behind is the green canvas of NHS screens, and on the 21st century ward is elderly patient Merry (Susan Wooldridge) being cared for by Mary.  Merry has visitors, her stressed daughter May (Olivia Williams) and her disinterested, bored granddaughter Miriam (Esther Smith).  The point here is that it is the black nurses Mary and Mamie (Déja J. Bowens) who are required to clean up Merry and change all the bedding after she soils the bed, not her concerned daughter.   

A white American mother patronises the Jamaican nannies in a park with her description of ackee breakfast on a luxury holiday to Jamaica.  We see Mary Seacole’s application to hugely crinolined Florence Nightingale (Olivia Williams) to assist in the Crimea rejected.  However Mary takes herself to the Crimea and sets up a boarding house and uses her healing skills. 

Another scene has modern day nurses being trained in the event of a terrorist attack.  This role play has sirens, smoke and explosions and merges into a battlefield scene of tailor’s dummies in red military uniform having lost their legs or maybe they were shirt dummies? 

Some of this play feels like a devised piece and this chaos places too many demands on the nurses and on the audience. 

Mother Seacole makes an impassioned speech for black nurses and black women to be accorded their rightful place and valued but it goes further and turns into a tirade against all white people.  This may alienate some Donmar supporters who would count themselves as enemies of all forms of racism, but the woke point is strongly made.