It’s both timely and awful that this hard-hitting tale of a junior doctor who’s not sure how much more she can take opened the day the boss of the NHS revealed the service is under greater pressure than ever. Nathan Ellis’s play blends low-key realism with sardonic wit and is anchored by a terrific central performance of tightly contained emotion by Jasmine Blackborow. It’s also somewhat mechanical in the way it puts her character Anna through the professional and personal wringer, especially at the end.
We first see Anna nursing her bleeding nose while a young man dressed as a leprechaun apologises: his brother-in-law, hospitalised during a stag do, punched her when she tried to insert a cannula. This injury adds to the insults she gets from patients for being too young, too female, too slow, too abrupt.
The endless, exasperating demands of treating the sick are expressed through two staccato monologues (“dizziness… semen… no, I’m not the nurse… it got up there accidentally?”) and two longer scenes with an older, suicidal married woman (Hayley Carmichael).
An overbearing consultant (Catherine Cusack, splendidly brittle) loads Anna with extra shifts: Anna’s sister Becca (Leah Whitaker) alternatively sympathises and guilt-trips her for workaholism. The attractive leprechaun, David, reappears sans costume. Lewis Shepherd, in a strikingly assured stage debut, imbues him with effortless warmth and charm. Things look up. But not for long.
There’s a pleasing economy to Ellis’s writing. He often leaves things unsaid or implied. The sisters have a hazily uneven and unbalanced relationship with their ageing father. Their mother may or may not have killed herself. Becca has a snarky 17-year-old daughter, Sammy, and is trying for a baby with her marathon-running partner. Is this a second marriage, or is there some other story there?
At other times, though, Ellis really spells things out. Sammy (LJ Johnson, icily fine) is contemplating medicine, cueing Anna up to reel off the pros and cons. I didn’t quite buy twining themes of suicide and burnout in the story. And the way Ellis systematically strips Anna of every ideal, hope, or consolation also reminded me of Tennessee Williams – not favourably.
Director Blanche McIntyre makes the very best of the material, though. She gives the more intimate encounters space to breathe and expand, then whips through the zippier ones like a consultant heading for the golf course. Scenes dissolve with a change of lighting and a swish of the emergency-room curtains on Andrew D Edwards’s simple but effective set. She handles the final scenes, which could feel gratuitous, with consummate skill.
Amid a fine ensemble, Blackborow stands out. In blue scrubs and ponytail, her Anna is a spellbinding mixture of strong and fragile, committed and disillusioned. She, McIntyre and Ellis basically take us on a parallel female version of Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt – to which there’s even a sly reference – condensed into 100 minutes. This play isn’t perfect, but as a warning about what we’ve let the NHS become, it feels important.
