FringeReview UK 2025
Tending
El Blackwood Productions in Partnership with Cavell
Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Live Music, New Writing, Political, Short Plays, Theatre, Verbatim Theatre
Venue: Riverside Studios, Hammersmith
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Who cares for the carers? There should be a Latin tag for that, then we might remember. As memories of Covid fade to a twitch of public trauma and private grief, El Blackwood’s Tending opens at Riverside Studios, Studio 3 directed by John Livesey (also dramaturg) after its multiple award-winning run at Edinburgh Fringe in 2024.
Essential theatre, essential witness and mandatory for anyone who wants to know how human we have to be, from beginning to end.
Review
“So this is for a play?” These three nurses aren’t sure about that, but settle after the voiceovers, as three actors take verbatim the witness of nurses’ experiences over the past eight years or so. Who cares for the carers? There should be a Latin tag for that, then we might remember. As memories of Covid fade to a twitch of public trauma and private grief, El Blackwood’s Tending opens at Riverside Studios, Studio 3 directed by John Livesey (also dramaturg) after its multiple award-winning run at Edinburgh Fringe in 2024. Blackwood herself plays the central second nurse, joined by Ben Lynn (Nurse 1) and, new to the cast, Mara Allen (Nurse 3). It plays till May 4th.
Taken from over 70 conversations Tending, crafted with refrains and a narrative always just starting, is, astonishingly, the first verbatim play on nurses. Narratively it could have moved over one night-shift. Instead it walks us through induction training, and almost immediately, Covid (where all three were moved to Adult ACU), the aftermath including burn-out and its consequences, and the strikes. It ends on the greatest verbatim moment I’ve ever heard.
Like her exact contemporary Philippa Lawford, whom she acknowledges, Blackwood’s one of those younger playwrights who formed her own company (El Blackwood Productions, in Partnership with the Cavell nursing foundation) and in this case acts too (Lawford directs), as well as securing a text from Salamander Street. Lawford – a name I somehow expected to find – writes what she knows. Blackwood, as an actor more exposed, perhaps necessarily writes of others, though the impetus is from a friend who nurses. I very much want to find out what Blackwood and Lawford write next.
Lynn and Allen, RADA graduates and high-profile actors are sovereign in their roles. Blackwood’s given herself both the most challenging yet more relatable, emotional role of the nurse who becomes “overly involved” as the notes suggest. Blackwood’s particularly affecting. Nurse 3 is meant to be more boundaried and judgemental though that didn’t quite come across. Allen humanises uber-coping Nurse 3 as she heads to burnout.
We’re introduced to such moments as Allen’s Nurse 3: “I was dead against nursing” as her mother already was, but ends up as an A&E Nurse after finding P.E. training appalling. Nurse 2, which Blackwood takes for herself, is the more emotive paediatric Nurse was inspired watching nurses from a war zone “watching them strapping babies to themselves and just running.” Lynn’s Nurse 1, a palliative care Nurse had failed meds to train as a doctor but found everything he needed in nursing. Indeed he found a connection with other nurses he never fond with doctors. What they outline is the mutual care for each other, which no-one else offers. There’s later excoriating treatment of the managers in charge, paying themselves huge salaries to oversee cutting (often as a CV to bigger cost-cutting jobs). And the appalling amount of admin.
Blackwood knows how to vary her material and we’re soon down with the humour, the smells and the rest (I’d best spare you that), and both the indignities of the patients and the way they dignify people. The young male cancer patient with drug-blistered lips “like Christ” whom Nurse 2 tends, and Nurse 1’s account of a 40-year-old man who fell drunk at a Christmas party and died later of catastrophic brain injury. Yet though with him for just 48 hours “if that” Nurse 1 was invited to the funeral and named in the eulogy. It’s one of the most moving moments, where Lynn’s spellbinding.
There’s wonderful moments of release too, as the three mention favourite food (“chocolate” “a six pack of ice-cold Coke”) and sneaking a mattress for just 20 minutes of sleep. And a moment of wild dancing as the lights redden to rave, releasing hair clips and flinging about. There’s a good deal of strategic pause and election here.
Allen’s narrative through Covid – the ensemble sashay together and apart – is wrenching and detailed. Everyone’s known to face burnout, and Nurse 3’s manager then doctor suggests two months rest. The covid period, as ensemble and solo witness is ferocious. The lack of PPE and other scandals aren’t dwelt on, but life-risking determination (so many medics died), multiple beeps, people dying with not enough medics, or Nurse 1 triaging the most sick. A 25-bed ward was cleared twice.
The sudden ‘give’ of the strike is chronologically placed but also works as a catharsis: speaking out, reveals huge public support the media and government wanted to keep from the public, who themselves charged in with food and support, and as one mentions, other strikers joining them: a moment reciprocated, illegal and absolutely right. When Nurse 3 relates a mental health patient locking themselves in a toilet you know the enemy is staring at you out of Westminster.
There’s just three bare chairs, no set and no need. Sarah Spencer’s sound design often kicks in when Ros Chase’s lighting subdues to a spectral out-of-time glow for Nurse 2 to deliver openings to a monologue we know she’ll finally deliver. And clubbing red to a thrash of music. Such moments are spare, artfully restrained, memorable.
I should declare an interest to confirm everything here, down to the “poo and stench”, being two months in hospital 2021-22, again in 2023 for a reversal. Patients wrenching off oxygen masks (they can die), desperation to calm them with a family, impossible during a pandemic (as Blackwood details in a harrowing moment). Oxygen level plummets; you shout warnings. I not only nearly died, but noted everything I could. Most, interviewing nurses with startling backstories. And, before and during the strikes, which happened on my second stint, politics. My (only intermittently verbatim) play’s now submitted, as promised to these people. It’s clear from this experience Blackwood has streamlined backstories so they’re more universal, less individual.
Some comms need improving though. There’s no information, not even a QR; and only purchasing a text and looking through the introduction are any credits to lighting and sound given for instance (not where they should be with director and producer). I had to source photos from a previous production, which has one cast member change. Eleanor Birdsall-Smith, as producer, needs to look after such things.
Blackwood on this evidence is flexing her imagination on given material. There’s a degree of sequential by-numbers chronological shaping, but this is inevitable. What shows Blackwood’s capable of far more is an obvious opening line that keeps repeating, so you know it will culminate. You’ll never predict what it is. It left me speechless and almost the same state as Blackwood who delivers it. This shows the future Blackwood. As it is, this is raw, essential theatre, essential witness and mandatory for anyone who wants to know how human we have to be, from beginning to end.
