Anyone hoping that Matt Charman’s play lifts the lid on the little-known world of international election observers is going to be mostly disappointed.
Richard Eyre’s solid production cannot disguise that many of Charman’s observations about observers could be gleaned from reading the newspapers. His dispassionate heroine (Anna Chancellor) is the deputy chief of an observation team in West Africa.
Her increasingly emotional attachment to her work and her translator is in turn discreetly observed by James Fleets’s linen-suited man from the Foreign Office.
Charman makes a point about how doing good can do bad. But the dilemmas and the outcome are exactly as expected.
Cottesloe stage, National Theatre,
London SE1
Tel: 020 7452 3000
