Mary Seacole

Bit of a rush at 6:15pm to get out the house. It was my fault. I hadn’t realised there’s a ten minutes gap in train departures between twenty-past and half-past. As a result we were rushing a little to get to the Donmar Warehouse where we were off to see ‘Marys Seacole’ a play that uses the life of Mary Seacole, a British-Jamaican nurse who set up the "British Hotel" behind the lines during the Crimean War and is arguably as influential to modern nursing as Florence Nightingale.  We went with Phil who had introduced us to the story of Mary on one of his history walks. 

It was not so much a play about her life story one influenced by, and including elements of her.  It jumped around in timelines and places - from Jamaica to the US to the battlefields of the Crimea - with an underlying message about message race and the outsourcing of care.  It’s a single performance with no internal and the last part, which is part fantasy and part horror was very strange and, sadly, lost me.

Afterwards we had dinner at Cote. We were the last diners before the kitchen closed but they served us efficiently even if I felt that we could have done more to be aware that they were looking to close up.  

We were home by 11:30pm to put the bins out. Glamorous.