Edinburgh Fringe 2024
In the Sick of It
Wake the Beast
Genre: Political
Venue: Assembly George Square Studio 5
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A largely verbatim, sometimes interactive theatre piece based on interviews with NHS staff, mixing satire with true personal stories and dark humour from the frontline of NHS in recent years.
Review
This engaging and moving play is constructed largely from verbatim excerpts of interviews that the company conducted with 500 NHS and social care members of staff in various departments and care homes from three NHS Trusts over a number of years from the pandemic and beyond.
In 2020, during the start of the pandemic, understandably out of work actor Adam McGuigan was approached, instigated by Dr Sue Gibbons, to produce something creative that involved interviewing NHS and care home staff about their working lives and feelings, aiming to support them and improve their mental health. They ambitiously describe their task as aiming to save the NHS. Later we glean they would create a performance piece to help staff cope with their tough working lives and get their traumatic experiences into perspective.
Co-created by Adam McGuigan (who also directs) and Kemi Coker, who also form the cast of two, they launch us into an entertaining, hour long, ever-changing, high octane, roller coaster of mini stories from staff in many different parts of the NHS trusts and care homes they spoke to. The audience is gripped throughout as we are peppered with dozens of stories from staff of what they have faced in recent years, from struggling to do their jobs due to lack of funding, staffing, equipment and support, as well as facing trauma, challenge, stress, racism from other staff and from patients who are also shown to sometimes be aggressive as well as full of gratitude. There are moments of humour but being verbatim theatre, much of the dialogue and most of the recordings played during the show are the actual words of staff who were interviewed, so there is a dominant theme of just how tough and largely impossible it is to actually do their jobs.
The trouble I have found over the years with many verbatim theatre pieces is, the form dictates that the makers have to construct montages of mini stories, from a wide range of voices and experiences. So the challenge is to find an overarching story that gives us a way to orientate ourselves, to take us on a narrative journey and tie together so many disparate stories in a meaningful way. In The Sick Of It tries to solve this problem with the story of Adam and Kemi creating a verbatim theatre piece for health workers, and as this became clearer, especially when they tell us of performing the piece to some of the people they interviewed, we get the point of the whole endeavour. The reactions they describe of some of the staff leaves us wondering if the performance piece helped as intended or further traumatised the staff. One of them leaves in silence and takes 2 years to answer an email about whether he is OK after seeing the piece. We are not told if he was Ok. But this is not the point of the piece for us, a Fringe audience. We are not the traumatised staff trying to cope with over-burdened working lives. What this piece very effectively does is to paint a vivid, gripping, sometimes upsetting and just occasionally uplifting picture, using dozens of vignettes, of an NHS and social care system on its knees, and huge numbers of staff only just keeping body and soul together. These are not new discoveries for most Brits, but it does bring home to us the human cost of years of Government austerity and mismanagement, which is achievement enough.
I could have done without the awkward audience Q&A about how to help the NHS, the interactive keepy-uppy ball game and the overlong rendition of Stand By Me and the play would benefit from some positivity, which in the show I saw first surfaced only in the final minutes. It acknowledged the quality of care and service that is still present in so many areas of the NHS thanks to staff commitment and technological and medical advances. Even so, this hour of theatre is a tour de force of spirited, passionate, political theatre that anyone who doubts the truth and claims about the evisceration of the NHS by the previous Government in recent years should see.
