The Human Body – Donmar Warehouse, London

Writer: Lucy Kirkwood

Director: Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee

Love at the dawn of the NHS, Lucy Kirkwood’s The Human Body is a theatre-cinema hybrid that blends post-war Hollywood glamour within the British political landscape. Premiering at the Donmar Warehouse and co-directed by outgoing Artistic Director Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee, this engrossing romance suggests the human body needs more than just medicine while charting the difficult social and political journey towards the agreement of doctors to become public servants, told from the perspective of a female doctor and local counsellor fighting misogyny and political apathy.

GP Iris becomes the star of a short advertorial shown before a main feature showcasing her multiple roles as doctor, politician and housewife, but frustrated by the limitations placed on her aspirations at work and at home, a chance encounter in a railway carriage turns into a great love. But with so much at stake nationally and professionally, can Iris afford to lose her heart?

Continually blending cinematic fantasy and a less satisfactory unequal reality, Kirkwood’s sweeping story is a cleverly managed examination of the post-war landscape, set in 1948 where the shine of a Labour government is already dulling against the nostalgia of Churchill’s war leadership. The Human Body takes place against this backdrop of middle-class anxiety, contrasting a political and cinematic utopia in which the former is presented as the more unrealistic. As George distracts Iris from her earnest busy life, so too is the escapism of cinema fed through the production.

Fly Davis’ film set design is metatheatrical but also smoothly managed with crew members creating and deconstructing scenes before our eyes. It all takes place in a studio set where roving cameras pick up the action and project it onto a big screen. It is a technique frequently used by Ivo van Hove to create intimacy and here, leaning into the David Lean Brief Encounter influences in the styling and script, the filming brings us into the budding attraction between Iris and George. It hones in on their hands touching for the first time, the lingering looks and, in a particularly pleasing moment, a three-technique combination of actors performing, their close-up projection and their shadows entwined beneath – it is beautiful stagecraft.

“I was perfectly happy being miserable” Iris opines as her love affair consumes her but with a husband who merely tolerates her ambition, the chemistry between Keeley Hawes’s restrained but driven Iris and Jack Davenport’s swoonsome George is intensely felt, lightly parodying British 1940s’ movie making but still finding wells of heartache as the architecture of Noel Coward’s template plays out in Kirkwood’s play, a noble sacrifice lending a glorious tragedy to their mutual goodness and decency. It helps that both Hawes and Davenport are such accomplished screen actors that they bring subtlety of expression to performances that must be both theatrical and cinematic at the same time, and it is quite a feat to make it seem so effortless.

Structurally, Kirkwood’s play is a female-led narrative and it is notable that more scenes involve women than men – a variety of characters performed by a uniformly excellent Siobhán Redmond, Pearl Mackie and Tom Goodman-Hill – particularly in the same week where the National Theatre’s play about Nye Bevan also begins performances. The Human Body is a celebration of the founding principles of the NHS and those who campaigned to make it happen, and while it finds great emotional impact in its central love story, the one thing the NHS has never been able to fix is a broken heart.

Runs until 13 April 2024