Poignant true stories from the health service front line
Mark Thomas: Check Up Traverse Theatre
Where It Hurts… Summerhall
The activist-minded comedian and (strangely lovable) lefty loudmouth Mark Thomas, 55, takes puppyish, infectious relish in hurling himself into different milieux and reporting on what he has found.
Cockney charmer, DIY investigative journalist and scampish troublemaker, his mission can be combative (as with his probe into the arms trade). It can also be benignly inquiring. Witness his latest endeavour – directed by Nicolas Kent: Check Up, a one-man audit of the NHS at 70.
If this show was a birthday card, it would open up to blare an electronic version of Abba’s Money, Money,
Money. No prizes for guessing what Thomas’s prescription for the crisis-beset behemoth is: “We’ve got to get our heads round the fact that the NHS is something we need to put more money in, year on year, forever!” he exclaims, in a state of evangelical rapture, towards the end of his hour.
Quibble – or quarrel – as much as you want with Thomas’s thesis. The fact is that he offers up a cornucopia of facts and fascinations. His attachment to the NHS is almost hereditary. His mother was a midwife. He was born, aptly, at St Thomas’ Hospital, opposite the Houses of Parliament. “I was literally born screaming at politicians,” he jokes and ensures the laughs come, regular as heartbeats, for the duration. He (almost) never derives humour at the expense of the weak, the sick or the injured – it’s just that sometimes the scene is plain surreal.
This is a show that comes from the guts – and he consequently springs about with vim and vigour. As his arms paint the picture like a possessed Rothko, we’re able to “watch” with him as unfortunates are rushed into the trauma unit at St Mary’s Paddington (one of four west London hospitals he got himself embedded in) and the staff respond with the precision of nanobots, the passion of the devoted.
Having consulted loads of bigwigs and wonks, he’s armed with statistics that may well bring a blush of shame to the more ardent Nhsbasher but concedes that in far too many areas, our health system is mediocre, if not substandard. The passing vignette he evokes of a husband so fearful of his dementia afflicted wife he has to sleep in the car, an oxygen cylinder at his side to assist his own pulmonary condition, delivers a “snapshot of social care in this country” so monstrous it’s enough to make you sick.
There are yet more visceral instances of trouble and strife on the front line of the NHS in the less slick but no less absorbing Where It Hurts…, mounted by Grassmarket Projects. Director Jeremy Deller has assembled a cast of non-actors – both erstwhile patients and health care workers – and written a script based on their various experiences.
The chaotic, volatile legacy of psychological scars and societal ills permeates the air. Within minutes, aggro kicks off between two of the men; a needling casual inquiry spirals into a fisty confrontation. We hear from a female victim of domestic violence (even see that violence harrowingly enacted), witness a couple heedlessly screaming at each other, and a mentally anguished man howling on his knees at the lack of treatment to help him. It’s as though all human life – frail, volatile, messed-up
– is here and whatever your knee-jerk thoughts on funding formulas, the bigger, tougher provocation is that there are no easy answers, no simple cures for the traumas that flesh is heir to.
Both run until Aug 26.
Check Up: 0131 228 1404; Traverse.co.uk. Where It Hurts…: 0131 560 1580; summerhall.co.uk