Stella Feehily's vision of the present state of the National Health Service is driven by first-hand experience, as her husband Max Stafford-Clark (who directs this production) had a stroke in 2006 and spent six months in hospital. Feehily focuses on 91-year-old Iris, who has a fall at home and finds herself on an NHS ward, where she encounters overstretched staff but also real kindness and — occasionally — confident medical expertise.
Stephanie Cole brings a natural authority to Iris, who seems far more robust than the resources on which she is determined to rely. While Iris’s son Nick (Brian Protheroe) has recently had a taste of bureaucracy at its most incompetent, with his prostate check-up delayed by a faulty computer, her daughter Mariel (Jane Wymark) is spikily unsympathetic. She’s supported in her insistence on the wonders of private healthcare by her American husband, a smug surgeon who at every opportunity talks up the virtues of his own country’s system.
The surreal inventiveness of Feehily’s writing is matched by a range of Brechtian devices. A display board announces that “The NHS is unwell”, protesters pop up in the midst of the audience, and we get a lecture on the workings of the much-maligned private finance initiatives. There’s also song and dance — jovial yet disturbing — and the NHS is personified as a mature lady lying dehydrated on a hospital trolley. An assessment of the NHS’s future takes the form of a weather forecast, and both Winston Churchill and Labour firebrand Nye Bevan make brief appearances, as does Margaret Thatcher in the guise of a talking budgerigar.
But for all the vigour of the performances, the arguments about policy and values never quite achieve dramatic vitality. The characters are instruments of an obvious political message, instead of feeling complex and surprising. Although the anxiety about the erosion of one of Britain’s great modern institutions is justified and urgent, it’s conveyed in an unwieldy fashion. The result is an important and impassioned play but not a wholly satisfying piece of theatre.
Until June 21 (0844 264 2140, stjamestheatre.co.uk)
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