Robert Tanitch reviews This May Hurt A Bit at St James Theatre, London SW1
The NHS, founded in 1948, the most popular institution in the UK, chronically underfunded, is, as we all know, in real difficulties. What is to be done? Something has to be done. Many of us owe our lives to the NHS. But whatever is done will be divisive.
When I heard Out of Joint, in a joint production with Bolton’s Octagon Theatre, was going to stage a play about the NHS directed by Max Stafford-Clark, I presumed it was going to be something satirical along the lines of Peter Nichols’s The National Health, which was such a success at the National Theatre in 1969 when the National Theatre was still at the Old Vic.
Stella Feehily’s This May Hurt A Bit, written in anger and sorrow, is all bits and pieces, which together do not make for a satisfactory whole. The performance is disappointing. It feels incomplete, as if the actors are still at a workshop stage.
Thus there is a bit of history, a bit of politics and a bit of docu-drama in the ward, such as you might find any day on television. An old woman (Stephanie Cole) momentarily loses her memory. A man in a wheelchair (Tristram Wymark) has a fit and nearly dies.
Winston Churchill and Aneurin Bevan put in an appearance. Maggie Thatcher is represented by a budgie in a cage. The Grim Reaper strides across the stage and later comes back to announce the death of the NHS (who is portrayed by a sick woman on a hospital trolley bed).
The propaganda is loud and clear. The very last words ring out: “We must not give up… We must fight.”
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