Writer: Adam McGuigan
Director: Adam McGuigan
In 2020 as the Pandemic swept through the country and theatre doors closed, Adam McGuigan landed an unusual job, to support healthcare staff exhausted by the pandemic through creative activities and verbatim theatre. The project In Our Own Words was initiated by Dr Sue Gibbons and saw McGuigan and co-creator Kemi Coker working with Clinical Psychologists in three London NHS Trusts and four Care Homes.
The real-life stories of more than 500 NHS staff and care workers they have spoken to since form the basis of this superbly powerful piece of theatre as McGuigan and Coker bring to life the full, exhausted and exhausting, reality of working in the National Health Service.
The brilliance of the show lies in the way it combines verbatim interviews with fast paced, frantic, physical theatre to give context to the words and the project. The early short responses of not having time to talk, as trolleys and chairs fly across the stage at speed, show how the things the project was trying to tackle were also things that would work against any attempt to meaningfully address them. This gives the subtext to longer verbatim sections where McGuigan and Coker capture the physical appearances as well as the voices of the NHS workers who spoke to them.
The verbatim pieces go deeper into issues that people may not have really thought about beforehand. The deployment of staff onto Intensive Care wards with little advance notice or training. The difficulties that caused for staff already on those wards and having to deal with an extra caseload as well as staff learning on the job, and the feeling of something resembling post-traumatic stress for the deployed staff when normal service was suddenly but briefly resumed. These are all captured in the stories, along with coping mechanisms imposed from above, such as a wellness session, and adopted by workers themselves, such as an online awards ceremony organised by a Prison hospital worker.
It’s important to note that the focus is not just on the pandemic, as later sections showing life on A and E wards superbly highlights. The production is painting a bigger picture of a service that had been underfunded, under resourced and under water long before 2020 and has been allowed to sink further since then to suit a narrative that undermines a publicly funded institution that had set a template that was once the envy of the world.
The show will leave you both angry and close to tears, for what has been allowed to happen to the NHS and what it means for the frontline workers who at times become the people that patients take their frustrations out on.
McGuigan and Coker jokingly note at the start that their aim is to save the NHS. At the end they note that this was always going to be an impossible task. But what they have done is create an extremely powerful piece of theatre that is thought provoking and entertaining and makes the case for the need to save the NHS in a truly compelling and innovative way.
Runs until 26 August (not 12th or 19th) 2024 | Image: Contributed
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