Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars
A black hole sign, as a nurse patiently explains to her patient in Uma Nada-Rajah’s new play, is a medical term for the markings of a scan revealing an ever expanding haemorrhaging of the brain. It is also used here by Nada-Rajah as a knowing comment on the state of the UK’s National Health Service, which is equally under attack by predatory parasites who would bleed one of the greatest post Second World War initiatives to the death if they could.
Such is the way in to Nada-Rajah’s very human case study of one night on the frontline of a hospital ward, where Helen Logan’s head nurse Crea is navigating her way through a whirlwind of everyday dramas involving staff as much as patients. Nurse Ani is trying to ensure one of her charges isn’t left alone during the night. Tersia has her silver dancing boots on as past and future collide. Isla is in more pain than she lets on, and there’s a hole in the roof that’s getting bigger by the minute. Clueless student Lina, meanwhile, accidentally lets loose a medical cabinet enhanced emergency that takes the play into more fantastical waters. This leaves Crea off guard enough to be hauled before a remote tribunal run by unseen bureaucrats.
There is a quiet anger to Nada-Rajah’s script as brought to life in Gareth Nicholls’ production, a collaboration between the Tron and Traverse Theatres in association with the National Theatre of Scotland. Where it could easily bombard the audience with predictable polemic culled from Nada-Rajah’s own experiences as a nurse, it simply plays out how a dedicated staff stretched to the limit in an under resourced institution still manage to work life and death miracles. When things go wrong, any human failure from an exhausted workforce is the fault of those at the top.
A cast led by a fantastic Helen Logan, who gives a beautifully nuanced performance as a world weary Crea, navigate their way around Anna Orton’s simple ward based set with a casual busyness that perfectly captures those in the thick of ordinary emergencies. Dani Heron too captures Ani’s idealism that acts as a counterpoint to Crea’s pragmatism. Betty Valencia brings light and shade to the twin roles of Lina and Isla, and Ann Louise Ross finds the fragile terror of Tersia. Martin Docherty’s porter Billy is a tender foil for Crea, and Beruce Khan’s bedbound patient a catalyst of sorts for everything that follows.
The play’s metaphorical landscape has been used to say much the same thing at least since the late 1960s by way of Peter Nichols’s play, The National Health, and into the early 1980s with Lindsay Anderson’s film, Britannia Hospital. The fact that there remains a need to keep saying it is as damning of where we are now as is the raging calm of a play that looks at an accident not so much waiting to happen as already in full poisonous flow.
The Herald, September 30th 2025
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