For years, one of the most discreetly
significant strands of subsidy in British theatre has been long-running
episodic TV series, which enable scores of actors and numerous writers
to earn a few quid on a quick guest-spot job until their next “proper”
engagement comes along. With the demise of
The Bill,
these series are almost exclusively medical-based. Eight of the eleven
actors in Nina Raine’s latest play have appeared on one or more of
Casualty,
Holby City and
Doctors.
The genre permeates both play and production. It is not simply that
this is a drama set in a hospital, with several storylines centred more
on the staff than the various patients; Raine openly acknowledges the
correspondences by making one of those patients the star of such a
series.
The characters and plots are
also immediately familiar, even if you’ve hardly ever watched these
programmes. There is the newly qualified, idealistic doctor (Ruth
Everett), the senior and junior martinets who rub everybody up the
wrong way but especially each other (Thusitha Jayasundera and Pip
Carter), the turbulent staff romance (Everett and Henry Lloyd-Hughes),
the surgeon whose relative is a patient (Jayasundera), the surgeon who
himself falls ill (Adam James)… which pretty much leaves Nicolas
Tennant as the persistently reasonable one.
Raine
directs her own script with fluidity and efficiency, especially in a
not-quite-chaotic opening scene of frenzied overlapping activity. Her
traverse staging is also the first time I can recall the Hampstead
Theatre being fundamentally reconfigured. The subcontinental motif of
the title (one surgeon uses the phrase to describe “sticking a knife in
close to an artery”) runs through the evening, with a registrar and a
theatre sister both of Indian extraction and between-scenes music of
tablas and
padhant. Raine
writes with intelligence and sensitivity, and uses her extensive
research well, although she grows a little conspicuously writerly in
the final scenes when medical terms are used time and again to describe
personal sensations and emotions. Ultimately, though, it is hard to see
why she chose such an area as the subject for her third play, for it
never shakes off the feeling of being a superior, staged hospital TV
drama. Perhaps in part she simply wanted to see how much she could do
with such a classic genre. The answer is a great deal, but still not
enough.
Written for the Financial
Times.