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What I’m Here For

Tron Theatre, Glasgow

Five stars 

 

Matters of life and death are all part of the daily grind for Flora, the overworked nurse who comes blinking into the light in this remarkable theatrical collaboration between Glasgow’s Vanishing Point company and Teater Katapult of Aarhus, Denmark on a new play by Josephine Eusebius. Arriving in Glasgow after premiering in Aarhus, Matthew Lenton’s production opens with Flora on a strip lit hospital roof, where she is catching a moment’s solitude as she recovers from the stresses of her latest shift with a rare cigarette to get her through. This noirish image is heightened by the row of performers who sit at microphones behind her, speaking stage directions as well as the assorted voices off demanding her attention. 

 

For much of the next sixty-five minutes it is only Flora, played by a tireless Lærke Schjærff Engelbrecht,  who occupies the main performing area, torn this way and that by an increasingly demanding array of patients, doctors and nurses embodied by the four other actors who step in and out of the action. Performed in English and Danish by a cast from each country and illuminated by surtitles in both languages, Lenton’s production takes the rhythmic rush of Eusebius’ text and renders the everyday mundanity of Flora’s situation as a stark and urgent ritualistic work. 

 

Pulsed along by Mark Melville’s brooding electronic underscore, despite the frenetic nature of Flora’s routine, it feels like a woozy dreamscape she has leapt into, with barely time to catch her breath, let alone have feelings or a life beyond the wards. Of course, Eusebius’ play is saying much about the resource starved state of health care now in a way that shows it as an international crisis, but this is no polemic. Rather, through a fusion of performances, Mai Katsume’s black box design, Melville’s sound and Simon Wilkinson’s ethereal lighting, it becomes a kind of sensurround meditation in which visual poetry marks out the losses in the thin air. 

 

With Engelbrech backed up on stage by Aisha Goodman, Aisha Lawal, Charlotte Trier and Mia Dinitzen, Flora becomes the pivot of an endless cycle that barely gives her chance to breathe. The end result is a slow burning tone poem full of light and shade that is as damning as it is devastating.


The Herald, April 3rd 2026

 

Ends

 

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