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.
