The Faithful Servant

Tom Davis’s The Faithful Servant is a beautifully crafted, thrilling play, with a fascinating story which questions the sometimes ambiguous morality of providing aid in third-world countries. Set over 51 years, the story follows Dr Raymond Gerard (PJ Williams), a surgeon who single-handedly set up a hospital in Mozambique and an aid organisation with the wonderfully vague name Australians for Hope. Gerard has complex and shifting relationships with his adopted Mozambiquean daughter Caroline and his second-in-charge, Mozambique native Coetano Perreira (Dorian Nkono).

After a 1965 prologue, the play begins in 2016 with Gerard’s death and proceeds backwards, picking out significant and dramatic events within the characters’ lives. Without ever resorting to overt gore, the play includes discomfortingly vivid descriptions of third world injuries and operations.  The team doesn’t shy from depicting the indignities of Gerard’s hospital death bed. The image of Dr Gerard in frank delirium haunted by the accusing figure of Perriera is intensely moving.

Informed by the author’s experience as  a consultant in international development, the script is tight with not a word spare, and the performances are superb. Gerard’s, Perriera’s and Caroline’s mature selves are slowly peeled back to their younger versions, revealing events and forces that have shaped them. PJ Williams brings enormous complexity to Gerard, who almost resembles a Graham Greene character. In the years before death Gerard has all but lost his belief in God, but the cultural constructs of Catholicism and white Australia inform his morality, blinding him to how patronising and unsustainable his model of aid is. Possibly without even recognising it himself, he comes to see himself and his work as almost messianic, and while he provides vital services at great personal cost, he treats both those around him and his patients as inferior. Dorian Nkono has a more subtle character in Coetano Perreira, who treats Gerard with enormous respect while well aware of the older man’s shortcomings. Tariro Mavondo’s Caroline Gerrard is mesmerising to watch, expressing deep emotion with her eyes in spite of appearing preternaturally calm. The depiction of all three at different ages is authentic.

The set and lighting design complements the drama, being for the most part minimalist with surprising elements of flamboyant excess. Props were at times more symbolic (a bundled blanket representing an anaesthetised patient) and at others heartbreakingly real (a full catheter set dangling from the side of the bed). The audience is seated in two rows on the stage so that they feel immersed in the action. Interspersed with the dusty realities of the hospital, the fundraising ads for the Australians for Hope charity are recognisably sanitised and clichéd.

Above all else, this is a riveting tale. With the scope of an epic and the economy of poetry, The Faithful Servant is a magnificent piece of theatre. 

Cathy Bannister

Photographer: Shelley Higgs.