Diana Nneka Atuona is modest but driven as a new playwright. She has deliberately chosen to write about a subject that came to obsess her – the 1989-2003 Liberian civil war and its depredations – rather than to “write about what you know”. (Atuona is British-born of Nigerian heritage.) And yet, despite its winning the 2013 Alfred Fagon Award and a staged reading at last summer’s Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, Liberian Girl strikes me as saying nothing at all original.
    
We first see the encroaching civil war shattering whole communities, setting them fleeing, including 14-year-old Martha (Juma Sharkah) and her grandmother. No surprises there. When they encounter a checkpoint run by adolescent rebel soldiers, all braggadocio and propaganda, they are terrorised by these boys who delight in their gun-given power. No surprises. Grandmother disappears, and Martha, who has been disguised as a boy in the hope of avoiding rape, is conscripted into the militia and renamed “Frisky” to fit in with her/his new comrades Killer and Double Trouble (Valentine Olukoga and Michael Ajao). The absence of surprise continues, as it does through Martha’s awkward encounter with a female captive and “Frisky’s” gradual habituation to the paramilitary lifestyle.
    
It is ably, even quite intensely staged by Matthew Dunster, but it feels too often like a morality play, a piece written to educate us simply and directly of its various points about the cost of such wars to women and children. (And also of the alternatives: just before the chaos broke out, Martha had been on the point of going to the “bush school”, which is later revealed to be a crucible of female genital mutilation. All ghastly but, God help us, still not surprising.)
    
My lack of engagement may be in part due to my having been seated upstairs at what is predominantly a promenade, “immersive” production. Yet that in itself raises questions: if one has to be amid the action to feel its power, then how real is that power? There is nothing whatever wrong with either emotional and moral button-pushing in general or with these targets in particular; it just all, at even a little distance, feels too blatant to be properly effective.

Written for the Financial Times.