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.