Happy Birthday NHS

Fest Mag / Catherine Love


After the Cuts (Niall Walker)

There are few things that unite Brits like the National Health Service. Just think back to the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony and the huge, illuminated tribute to our NHS nurses and doctors. “We think it’s our National Health Service,” observes comedian and theatre-maker Mark Thomas. “We think we’ve paid for it, it belongs to us. We see it as part of our identity.”

But, as Thomas also points out, we currently have an NHS that is “on its knees”. After years of austerity, Theresa May recently announced a £20 billion funding injection for the NHS in England, but even this has been seen by many as too little, too late. Thomas’s new show, Check Up: Our NHS at 70, is one of a clutch of productions at this year’s Fringe contemplating the past, present and future of national healthcare.

Another of those theatre-makers is writer Michael Pinchbeck, who explains that his theatricalisation of A Fortunate Man is a “piece about how we care and about how caring might have changed in the NHS today”. It treats John Berger and Jean Mohr’s 1967 book, documenting the work of a country GP, as a “lens though which we can see how doctors today work”. His take on the book is that it’s an “exploration, not an adaptation”, beginning as a lecture before becoming increasingly theatrical.

Both Pinchbeck and Thomas have interviewed people working within the NHS today, looking at the organisation’s past through the prism of its present. What they quickly discovered was a culture of targets and overworking, compounded by the failures of social care.

Thomas’s show will use his trademark mix of storytelling and humour—“I’ll be telling stories and fucking about,” as he puts it—to make political points about austerity and creeping privatisation. He sees the NHS as part of a bigger picture: “If you want the NHS to be saved—and it does need to be saved—then one of the things you need to do is treat health as an important factor in every single thing, from education to housing to the first eight years of a child’s life.”

Unlike Check UpA Fortunate Man is “not a political piece with a capital P”, but for Pinchbeck there’s something implicitly political about showing the pressures that GPs find themselves under today and contrasting that with the more personal care that doctors could offer in the 1960s. “They have less time to attend to people, they have a higher workload, they have a longer working day,” says Pinchbeck. “We’ve interviewed doctors who tell us they don’t take lunch breaks, they’re working constantly.”

A Fortunate Man (L-R) Hayley Doherty, Matthew Brown. Credit: Julian Hughes.

Thomas suggests that criticising these failings is a vital part of keeping the NHS for another 70 years. “Our love of the NHS might actually be doing it harm,” he says. “Because we need to be critical of it and we need to get out of this mindset that says if you attack the NHS then you’re the Daily Mail and you want to destroy it.” Thomas also believes that if we’re serious about saving the NHS, “we as a society have got to stop seeing old people as a problem”. He goes on: “If we can see old people as visions of our future self, then we might begin to understand what care and what support they need.”

Gary McNair’s dark comedy After the Cuts imagines a future in which we’ve failed to develop that understanding and our NHS has fallen through the cracks. “Things are just gradually getting worse and I wanted to call that out,” explains McNair. “The play is inspired by ‘what if we don’t have this beloved thing?’” At the centre of the narrative is an ageing couple who are forced to take their lives quite literally in their own hands when one of them is diagnosed with cancer and finds themselves uninsurable.

According to McNair, After the Cuts is less a play about the NHS than it is a play about humanity. “Would you wait and watch your loved one die if the state dropped out and left you to your own devices? Do you try and do something? It is about those questions.” Though McNair feels strongly about the issue, he isn’t providing any answers. “I’m desperate for us to fix and save our NHS,” he says. “I don’t know how to do that, but I can certainly imagine a horrid future without it.”

As his play suggests, McNair is not optimistic about the future of the NHS. “You can see it starting to be sold to us that it’s a bad idea,” he says, lamenting that people are swallowing that line all too easily. “It bothers me that people might accept the end of our NHS.”

A Fortunate Man looks less to the future, though there’s implicit concern about the state of public healthcare in its look at the current strains on the NHS.

Thomas, meanwhile, has a little more faith in the power of collective action and sees Check Up—like all his theatre—as a central part of his work as an activist. “Public opinion is a great thing, it’s a great tool,” he says, observing how public pressure has forced the government to pledge more money to the NHS. “I see the show as a small contribution for a bigger debate than this to happen.”

Have a Healthy Festival

Where It Hurts 

Jeremy Weller’s new show looks at the NHS from the perspectives of both patients and health professionals, drawing on the real experiences of a group of Edinburgh residents.

WEIRD 

This one-woman show from Some Riot Theatre uses personal experience to provide an insight into living with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Pricks 

Jade Byrne is busting myths about type 1 diabetes using a mixture of spoken word, poetry, projection and sound.

In Addition 

Like After the Cuts, this new piece of physical theatre imagines a future without the NHS, exploring the impact of privatised healthcare on one young couple.

How to Keep Time: A Drum Solo for Dementia 

Antosh Wojcik uses poetry and drumbeats to look at the effects of Alzheimer’s on speech and memory.