Writer: El Blackwood
Director: John Livesey
Three pale blue plastic chairs, with equal space between them, are placed in front of a blue pleated screen. There’s one, then two people seated, and a third arrives, moving through the audience. One male, two females don their ‘scrubs’ over their civvies, also blue. Part of the Housemates Festival 2024, Brixton House’s flagship artistic development programme, right now we’re in an unnamed hospital, perhaps many hospitals, NHS not private (the blue is the giveaway), in the company of some frontline nurses for some top-notch verbatim theatre.
Tending, which involved two years of research and interviewing an army of nurses working in frontline care, is the powerful, moving result. While doctors keep their distance and offer diagnostics, it’s nurses who care for patients daily. An illuminating, unflinching portrayal of the nursing profession, this valuable piece of work, full of light and dark, rings out its authenticity and truth.
Writer, El Blackwood performs as Nurse 2. She has a story she wants to tell, but it sits like a trapped internal trauma, refusing to speak. Ben Lynn, Nurse 1, leaves us with an indelible image of his cat walking the corridor holding aloft a fetid stool in a commode. Mara Allen, as brisk and fallible Nurse 3, believes the word resilience is overused. From the aspirations and hopes of those who arrive in the profession to the daily reality and final reflections, Tending is full of tenderness and sadness. Aside from the routine fluids and emissions are grief, suicide, depression, miscarriage, death, COVID. And sometimes, there is dancing and hugs.
Here, the use of verbatim theatre is like an intravenous drip that feeds directly into the veins of the audience. With incisive direction, Tending demonstrates the toll this profession takes on the minds and bodies of those who serve in a war with no end. Effective and subtle use of lighting and contemporary sound by respectively Ros Chase and Sarah Spencer brilliantly convey the emotive, sensory impact on NHS nurses who work crushingly long hours in a system stretched paper-thin. There is laughter and some joy, but never far is anxiety, exhaustion, fear, and dread. It’s not unusual for nurses to lock themselves in the toilet to grab 15 minutes of solitary sleep. Or for patients to die in the waiting room.
Impressively crafted, the play exposes its verbatim workings but not intrusively. While it might seem an easy thing to record the stories of real people, it involves a detective’s skill in wheedling out the heart-wrenching anecdote and a therapist’s persistence in getting feelings articulated. Then there’s the assembling of all this information into an hour-long play, both musical and meaningful in its delivery, well-paced with poetic, profound moments.
Often presented as saints or cannon fodder, nurses are often invisible and unheard. Here, we see and hear humans who also need to be cared for. Tending, which achieved critical and commercial success at Edinburgh Fringe in 2023, returns to Underbelly for a month-long run later this year. This is a play that should be seen by anyone who’s ever been sick or will become sick – and every MP, including Wes Streeting. Cavell, a charity that supports UK nurses, midwives, and nursing associates, is the charity partner for Tending.
Runs until 12 October 2024
