Reading the reviews from previous stops on the tour I’ve frequently seen the word agitprop, something I’ve not heard for a while. Certain political climates do seem to create an appetite for this sort of theatre and this piece takes a particularly hot potato as its subject.
Tim Shortall’s set with its shabby white paint and grey linoleum places us for the most part in the Harrington Hospital, just ambiguous enough to enable the setting to be in a ward, a corridor, a consulting room and a reception area at A&E and to double up as other locations in between.
After a disembodied voice delivers a radio announcement Aneurin Bevan appears on stage and introduces us to his aspirations for the NHS in 1948. Then fast-forward to 2011, where the Prime Minister is receiving advice for PMQs about the Health and Social Care Bill from a civil servant who owes a good deal to Nigel Hawthorne’s Humphrey Appleby. William Hope, who plays this and three other roles, took a round of applause for delivering a single sentence that takes up ten lines on the page.
Through successive scenes we see the advancing malady of the ailing system, as patients wait to be seen by indifferent consultants and tempers fray. Nurses stretched beyond breaking point are unable to be in enough places at once and administrative errors lose thousands of records and news of a death is delivered to the wrong family. Throughout all of this a digital display panel prompts us with dates and places and the occasional observation.
The narrative is episodic, with the progression of set pieces punctuated by some occasionally surreal musical interludes and other interjections, including a short presentation about Private Finance Initiatives – and yes – here we should be angry.
Another splendid speech is delivered by Jane Wymark who, lying on a trolley, personifies the critically ill NHS itself and regales us with a rundown of the mixed relationships she’s had with politicians through the decades. Wymark also brilliantly plays the brittle Mariel, whose partner is American orthopaedic surgeon Hank (William Hope again). Her brother Tristram plays five characters, ranging from Winston Churchill to a startlingly frisky stroke patient, and early in the piece gives a digital examination to Brian Protheroe. He, after first playing the PM, has now become Nicholas, a retired widower with a prostate the size of a space hopper.
Frances Ashman is a researcher, a consultant, a harassed receptionist and auxiliary and, in a genius performance, Dinah – a geriatric patient who has lost all grip on reality. Natalie Klamar also has four roles. She appears first as an irate interloper and later is a weather presenter, another researcher, and a disillusioned nurse who reaches the end of her tether.
Hywel Morgan transforms between Aneurin Bevan, a prisoner in A&E handcuffed to a policeman, a paramedic and a porter, while William Hope is said police officer and, believe it or not, the Grim Reaper in a scene reminiscent of Monty Python.
Only Stephanie Cole gets away with a single character. Mariel and Nicholas’s mother Iris is in her nineties but as sharp witted and sprightly as anything, except when a fall triggers episodes of transient global amnesia. As with most the characters her dialogue often doesn’t pull any punches, but somehow the expletives that flow from her lips are all the funnier for coming from an apparently genteel elderly woman.
Stella Feehily’s writing is angry and passionate, and about a highly emotive subject, but it manages to get its point across without ever preaching to its audience. Although the drama is played out almost in a sequence of vignettes, director Max Stafford-Clark (the author’s husband) manages to keep it flowing and draws tremendously committed performances from his multitasking cast.
Just here and there I wondered whether some of the passages of exposition and digital captions were entirely necessary, but there will be segments of audiences who do need to be filled in on who Nye Bevan was and some of the rest of the service’s chequered history.
This is highly topical theatre that enables us to take a step back and examine how much the NHS means to us. It is at Liverpool Playhouse until Saturday and then completes its tour schedule at the St James Theatre London from 14th May to 21st June.
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