Taking the pulse of our NHS
0 Where It Hurts is set in the waiting room of a psychiatric unit
visit to an operating theatre, where he meets an immensely theatrical surgeon; at his most politically shocking in his interview with a former boss of the King’s Fund, who says that there was simply no practical healthcare argument for the expensive and ideologically-driven market “reforms” to the English NHS introduced in the Health And Social Care Act of 2012.
And he is at his most profoundly moving when he talks about the nurses in a dementia ward in west London. At one level, they are just ordinary women doing their job. Yet at another, they are the angels and miracle-makers we often meet when we encounter the NHS; people working for an organisation whose job is to care for everyone, regardless of
age, beauty or wealth, and whose magnificent daily response to that challenge has become a vital part of Britain’s culture and identity, fully celebrated here by one of the nation’s great storytellers, in loving, angry and unstoppable form.
The pressures on the 21st century NHS also loom large in the director Jeremy Weller’s latest Grassmarket Project show Where It Hurts, also inspired by the NHS anniversary, and set in the waiting room of a psychiatric unit where 14 non-professional performers, people with experience of mental health problems, play their desperate former selves, crying out for help from a system that often has little to offer.
There are people with drug and drink problems, and legacies of pain left by domestic violence. There is unemployment, divorce and the agony of childlessness; and there is the overlong but significant tale of the psychiatric nurse who finds, one day, that he can no longer do his job, and becomes a patient in his own hospital.
In the end, an NHS psychiatrist offers his thoughts; reflecting the feeling of all the patients that imperfect though our NHS is, the idea of the open door which offers a refuge for everyone and will ask where it hurts even of those whose hurt pervades their whole being, remains a vital one, to be cherished and defended to the last.
JOYCE MCMILLAN
Mark Thomas – Check Up: Our NHS at 70 until 26 August, today 10am. Where It Hurts until 26 August, today 8:30pm. C aquila (Venue 21) JJJ
She’s been described as a bimbo, stalker and seductress. She describes herself as loving, loyal, intelligent – and misrepresented. She is, of course, the brilliant Monica Lewinsky. And while this fun but thought-provoking little play won’t necessarily tell fans anything they don’t already know from Monica’s TED talk The Price of Shame, it starkly contrasts the cold descriptions of sex acts that came to define her relationship with Bill Clinton with the romance, compassion and optimistic outlook of a bright young woman.
The show within a show, in which the company cheerily chat about the process of making the piece and take it in turns to play Monica, Bill and Monica’s “fucking awful friend” Linda Tripp, touches upon issues of power, sexism and the right to privacy, but mainly celebrates one woman’s refusal to feel bad for falling in love.
When the young company briefly meet Monica, she doesn’t seem entirely convinced by the idea of yet more people trying to tell her tale, but the show’s done with heart and humour, and captures the spirit of a woman who has reclaimed her story in the face of monumental efforts to take it off her. SALLY STOTT
Until 18 August. Today 8:25pm.