Multiple Casualty Incident
British playwright Sami Ibrahim’s 2022 play ‘two Palestinians go dogging’, was a divisive one. Some praised the experimental dark comedy, set in Palestine in the year 2043. Others didn’t really know what was going on. But critics echoed that, no matter what, this unrelenting show stayed with you. Ibrahim’s follow-up, ‘Multiple Casualty Incident’, is just as unforgettable. In Jaz Woodcock-Stewart’s production, we’re thrown in with a group of employees at a medical aid charity who are in the second week of training before entering an area destroyed by war. Palestine isn’t mentioned by name, but after six months of stories from Gaza, it’s hard not to think of it. On stage: four figures, in what appears to be an unused office. It’s a matter of weeks until they fly across the world, and they need to be prepared. ‘We’re not political, but we do have a duty of care,’ group leader Nicki (Mariah Louca) warns. So they role play, assigning themselves as medical professionals and ‘primary actors’. Morals are easy to have in a philosophical debate, but how would they actually behave in these real-life real-life trolley problems? It might not sound like a laugh a minute, but there’s a lot of levity in Ibrahim’s script. The characters giggle in the room too, then unconvincingly caveat: ‘Sorry, that’s bad’. Among the trainees, the two doctors rub each other the wrong way. Sarah (Rosa Robson) is forthright and snarky, prone to the exact kind of ‘Guardian moral bollocks’ that Dan (Peter Corboy