12.10.15

Two women, 100 years apart, both held captive in a war zone. There’s Edith Cavell, a real British nurse who helped smuggle soldiers out of Belgium in the first world war, and there’s Edi Martin, the invention of writer Clive Holland: a war reporter taken hostage in the Middle East. Both are played by Mary Rose in this one-woman production.

There might be interesting resonances between these two women, but this play doesn’t find them. It’s a dour production, with Rose giving a hang-dog, earnest performance. Mostly we are with Edi, looking back over her life, yet flashbacks to childhood fail to convince. And while Edi is—as you would expect—an emotional mess, Edith is the prim picture of stiff-upper-lip; we get no glimpse of an interior life and the parallels are diminished.

There is also some frankly ill thought through aligning of the way Edith was used as a martyr figure to aid recruitment, and the way hostage videos today are used as terrorist propaganda by extremist groups. The parallel just doesn’t work.

The show is strongest in evoking the minutiae of the journalist’s experience, including horribly telling survival tactics: she makes herself throw up because a woman with food poisoning is less likely to be raped. 12.10.15 offers a bleak reminder of how kidnappings are becoming so commonplace, they fail to be news: in 2014, 66 journalists were killed. The show bears witness to the bravery of women in warzones, but fails to really ignite the subject.