FringeReview UK 2024
The Human Body
Donmar Warehouse
Genre: Drama, Feminist Theatre, Historical, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Donmar Warehouse
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
With the NHS under threat at 75, Tim Price’s Nye now playing at the National follows Lucy Kirkwood’s The Human Body in affirming its foundation. Directed by Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee at the Donmar as Longhurst’s swansong there, the latter’s an altogether more intricate work.
Kirkwood though focuses both on 1948 itself and its impact on one doctor, also Labour councillor and prospective MP: Iris Elcock (Keeley Hawes) who encounters cynical Hollywood B-lister/local boy made good George Blythe (Jack Davenport). He’s missed the war, married to a glamorous actor who’s removed herself from view. George is back to look after his mother, one of Elcock’s patients.
Kirkwood proves yet again how versatile she is, and how science inflects most of her best work. This quieter work might lack the panache of Chimerica or Witches. This is though a more durable, shapely, astute play than Kirkwood’s less politically sure-footed This Is Not Who I Am, with its numinous gestures to political oppression centred around information, when the truth is brute power.
Arguments around how the NHS might lose are presciently, not obviously bolted on: Tory hostility planted by Nye himself, the residual conservatism of voters blaming Labour for austerity, about to engulf a new Labour government.
Ultimately, the self-conscious homage detracts, narrative doesn’t settle to the deepest feelings. The work’s best at its quietest, where intimacy doesn’t need shouting. It’s still an intriguing development, as Kirkwood, as in her magnificent The Welkin, interrogates the condescensions of history.
Written by Lucy Kirkwood Directed by Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee, Set & Costume Designer Fly Davis, Lighting Designer Joshua Pharo, Sound Designers and Composers Ben and Max Ringham, Video Designers Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom, Associate Designer Tom Paris, Associate Video Designer Owen Visser, Fight Director Bret Yount, Intimacy Director Sara Green
Voice Coach Barbara Houseman, Dialect Coach Penny Dyer, Dialect Coach Hazel Holder, Casting Anna Cooper CDG.
Production Manager Chris Hay, Costumer Supervisor Lisa Aitken, Props Supervisor Martha Mamo for Propworks, Assistant Props Supervisor Lauren Thompson for Propworks, Wigs, Hair & Make-up Supervisor Suzanne Scotcher, Wigs, Hair and Make-Up Manager Rhona Phipps-Tyndall, Wigs, Hair & Make-up Assistant Dani Michalski, Dresser Katie Flynn,
Resident Assistant Director Grace Duggan, Rehearsal CSM Lizzie Donaghy, Company Manager Kate McDowell, Stage Manager Daniel Haynes, DSM Katie Stephen, ASM Edit Fitt-Martin, Technical ASM Antonia Howlett, Stage Manager Intern Joshua Sparks
Camera Operator Jack Somerset, Automation Operator Matt Neubauer, Sound No.1 El Theodorou
Assistant Set & Costume Designer Rimu Kwowk, Assistant Lighting Designer Cheng King, Assistant Sound Designer José Guillermo Puello.
Production Photographer Marc Brenner
Till April 13th
Review
With the NHS under threat at 75, Tim Price’s Nye now playing at the National follows Lucy Kirkwood’s The Human Body in affirming its foundation. Directed by Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee at the Donmar as Longhurst’s swansong there, the latter’s an altogether more intricate work.
Kirkwood though focuses both on 1948 itself and its impact on one doctor, also Labour councillor and prospective MP: Iris Elcock (Keeley Hawes) who encounters cynical Hollywood B-lister/local boy made good George Blythe (Jack Davenport). He’s missed the war, married to a glamorous actor who’s removed herself from view. George is back to look after his mother, one of Elcock’s patients.
This is Kirkwood fresh from adapting Roald Dahl’s Witches at the National last December, and her contemporary political thriller This Is Not Who I Am and the Royal Court in 2022.
There’s more than one homage. A love story, The Human Body also traces a love affair with teasing hommage to Brief Encounter. Even to Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom’s video-projecting the action in black and white above the principal actors’ heads. And they’re starry enough in their own right.
From the start we’re in studios as Elcock’s interviewed on her multitasking, so professional women’s roles are highlighted as a freakish juggling-act. Later Elcock’s asked by a female interviewer for a domestic tip: she comes up with placing a piece of coal near a lettuce to keep it fresh. Elcock’s personal challenge in fact is trying to keep the members of a doomed marriage together.
But it’s she who makes the first move on George after they meet by chance. And it’s Elcock who’s both doctor and mother: a neat absorption of Brief Encounter’s doctor into this 1948 narrative, leaving George a mere actor. At one moment they even reference the film Elcock barely recalls, one of the few she’s bothered to see.
Davenport switches from weary superficial cynic to a genuine engagement, suddenly quoting Housman with intensity (‘When I was in Love With You’) inflected with his native Shropshire: a poem Elcock knows. Davenport’s convincing reveals of George’s dilemma and his passion, as the apolitical apathetic side burns off are part of the sheer chemistry he and Hawes bring.
Hawes is herself sovereign, breaking through any Johnson barrier to finally blaze out for instance in her Labour selection process, and going to more extremes – as these lovers do – to realise a self beyond her juggling. Hawes is watchable on and off screen, every note of conflict registering. It’s a tour-de-force for both and one great reason to see The Human Body.
The conscious performative nature of their relationship plays above their heads as if they’re not only playing that role to themselves, but each other. George is suffused with acting, Elcock finds confidence in it. But is their attraction that artificially performative?
There are telling close-ups we might otherwise miss: Elcock’s fingers brushing George’s on the restaurant table. It’s all managed with videographers and stage mangers bringing on camera and handing props in a witty film-studio ballet.
Since Fly Davis’ set below the part-time silver screen is strikingly at odds with it, emphasising the two worlds of austerity and dream. It’s in NHS matte denim blues and greys, down to teacups, telephones, canapés. Joshua Pharo’s lighting is. miracle of discretion and Max and Ben Ringham bring period filmtrack sound including Rachmaninov with a mix of affection and ironic juxtaposition.
Tom Goodman-Hill’s one of three multi-roling actors all hurling accents and attitudes in the air in dazzling variety. Beyond the high-voltage principals, it’s worth just absorbing how consummately, almost comedically they turn on a vowel morphing from one to another. Goodman-Hill particularly gleams as unpleasant Julian Elcock, war-scarred naval doctor who sold his practice (this is pre-NHS) and grumps about repelling his wife’s advances.
Goodman-Hill manages to inject enough sympathy for Julian’s obvious suffering yet twist it to an inherent vicious streak brought on by pain. Worst, he’s just turned against the founding of the NHS. Elcock only discovers it though her other job: the Labour party.
Politically Elcock is PPS and protégé of her MP boss: Siobhan Redmond’s Leeds-born Helen Mackeson “the fiery particle” a gleefully lusty mix of Jenny Lee and Barbara Castle, who plans great things for her. Redmond’s another who sashays through other roles, particularly George’s ill but shrewd mother Mrs Howells and Shirley, Julian’s watchful sister.
Pearl Mackie shapes-shifts most wondrously as film-star Sylvia Samuels in two striking iterations, as poverty-stricken Mrs Sieves and Jamaican-born nurse Averill Hughes, who’s followed her Spitfire-flying husband to the ends of the earth, she quips: a Kidderminster RAF grave. Their much to do for Elcock’s daughter Laura (Laura Celia Johnson’s name of course) and briefly ailing Barbara Sieves played winningly by Flora Jacoby-Richardson on this occasion, making her stage debut.
Kirkwood brings the play to a crisis ironically around the day of the NHS’s founding: July 5th 1948, where there’s an important rally and Nye uses the word “vermin” infuriating Helen and – where’s Elcock?
Kirkwood proves yet again how versatile she is, how science inflects most of her best work and how she proves even not at her very finest she’s the most compelling of younger dramatists.
This quieter work might lack the panache of Chimerica or Witches. This is though a more durable, shapely, astute play than Kirkwood’s less politically sure-footed This Is Not Who I Am, with its numinous gestures to political oppression centred around information, when the truth is brute power.
Arguments around how the NHS might lose are presciently, not obviously bolted on: Tory hostility planted by Nye himself, the residual conservatism of voters blaming Labour for austerity, about to engulf a new Labour government.
Ultimately, the self-conscious homage detracts, narrative doesn’t settle to the deepest feelings. The work’s best at its quietest, where intimacy doesn’t need shouting. It’s still an intriguing development, as Kirkwood, as in her magnificent The Welkin, interrogates the condescensions of history.
