A CANBERRA play set in Mozambique may sound very odd, but when “CityNews” talks to playwright Tom Davis about “The Faithful Servant”, it all becomes clear.

Davis, though a seasoned stage writer with five scripts to his name including last year’s “The Chain Bridge”, is also a political scientist who has worked for the former AusAID (now DFAT) and for NGOs in places such as PNG, the Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste – and he has serious ethical and moral questions to explore.

Not, as he is quick to stress, that he ever confuses playwriting with anthropological research. “It’s a real play, not a thesis,” he assures us.

He’s been a Canberra resident for five years or so and these days mixes a writing career with overseas contracts. Curiously, Davis has never been to Mozambique, the partial setting of “The Faithful Servant”.

The play, developed through The Street Theatre’s “Hive” and “First Seen” programs, is coming to The Street soon in a production by Caroline Stacey featuring the acting talents of PJ Williams, Dorian Nkono and Tariro Mavondo.

Now it’s time for Davis to sit down and enjoy watching Stacey and her team at work. The traverse staging will turn the stage of Street One into a long, dusty road in Mozambique with her regulars, scenic/costume designer Imogen Keen and sound designer Kimmo Vennonen and new lighting designer Linda Buck aiding and abetting that transformation.

It was Davis’ Timorese connections to former colonisers, the Portuguese, that got him thinking about Mozambique.

“I wanted my characters to be in a place where there’s a sense of ‘otherness’,” he explains.

The play has been through many drafts. “In the first version I wasn’t writing about aid, I was writing about goodness… a lot of theatre is about badness – look at “Richard III” – but what is it to be good?”

And he planned to make his main character a Canberra public servant, “but I was drawn to a slightly bigger model”.

Briefly, Dr Raymond Gerrard starts out an idealistic young Methodist medico in the 1960s, but his idealism and his world view views shrink. How did he get to that point?

Raymond and his offstage wife adopt a daughter at birth in Mozambique, call her Caroline (Stacey must find that intriguing) and raise her in Australia. The question is whether she will take up Raymond’s mantle at his Fred Hollows-type clinic in Mozambique. Her view of goodness differs from his, her life is with her family in Australia and her own GP practice, but where does she really belong?

Then there’s the character Coetano, a local Mozambiqui who has assisted Raymond in the hospital for more than 50 years. Now he wants to transform the NGO into a faith-based organisation. He’s good, yes, but also self-serving, status-conscious and manipulative. Coetano knows how to connect with both his own people and outsiders, but as Davis says: “He has to do this funny dance to get what is needed”.

It’s a triangle of characters who are all good people, but with clashing world views – and that makes for good theatre.

“The Faithful Servant”, The Street Theatre, September 6-18, bookings to thestreet.org.au or 6247 1223.