Nina Raine’s play about the inner workings of a busy hospital couldn’t be more timely – nor harder to watch.
Out of the ironically precisely choreographed chaos that is A&E , comes a string of stories about warring doctors and nurses, minute-by-minute ethical and medical dilemmas, egos, tantrums and genuine devotion to duty.
It’s the loveable old NHS at its gory worst and its compassionate best. Emily ( Ruth Everett ) is a newly-arrived junior doctor with eager naivety and a desire to save every single patient – which in A and E is a lost cause.
Everett charts her emotional physical decline brilliantly – her failure to keep patients alive and her refusal to accept the situation.
Indira Varma is a feisty, apparently unpleasant and uncaring maverick who says it like it is and manages to upset almost everyone’s she comes across. When her aunt deteriorates in her hospital due she believes to the neglect of her consultant, there’s a crossroads for her future career.
But in a stroke of brilliance and the dying moments of the play, she has to decide whether to tell a famous soap star that his case is hopeless and ask if they should not try to resuscitate him in an emergency. It’s the hardest and most touching scene of the play.
The utter mundanity and gallows humour of the medics’ routine days contrasts with the helplessness of the patients and their touching total faith in their healers and carers.
As we applaud them every Thursday, it’s a searing look at an institution that is over-worked, under-resourced and error-prone but which we all still love and cherish.
It’s a very difficult watch but rewarding and directed at breakneck pace by the playwright.
Tiger Country is available free on hampsteadtheatre.com until 10pm Sunday April 26th.
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