The Human Body

After some strange shenanigans with tickets at the Donmar, we ended up with much better seats than we started with and, as I was potentially going to be one of those annoying people with a cough, I was also pleased to see we were next to an aisle so I could make an escape if needed.  However, the aisle turned out to be the main thoroughfare for the many, many scene changes, with beds, sofas and trolleys rattling past my knees every minute or so, adding a whole level of jeopardy I hadn’t expected.  

The play was one of quite a few around at the moment, set at the difficult birth of the NHS.  In this case with Keeley Hawes playing Iris, a woman GP and Labour councillor campaigning to get the NHS started against the opposition of doctors (including her husband) and also trying to be a good wife and mother.  The different post war gendered experiences are laid out very clearly here with women being pushed back into the home, whilst men are dealing with the mental and physical fallout from the war.  A blue/grey monochrome sets the tone for this post war world. Into this greyness comes a movie star (played by a still dashing Jack Davenport).  And with him come the cameras which bring a Hollywood glamour to this grey world, and give Iris her very own Brief Encounter.  The cinema is consistently referenced here as a form of escape from the realities of the world, although it turns out there are complications and realities to be faced even in the glamorous world of the movies.

The lead performances were great, and the multiple other characters were played with panache by Tom Goodman-Hill, Siobhan Redmond and Pearl Mackie.  The messages of the play were sometimes a bit on the nose, but my main hesitations here are mainly with the sheer amount of scenes, particularly in the first half, which broke things up too much and meant it took far too long to make some fairly straightforward points.  Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed quite so much if every one of those changes hadn’t involved some fairly chunky bits of furniture rattling past my knees, but even so I think this play could have been done in 2 hours.  Despite those misgivings, the main message that sometimes the hard grind and tough decisions are worthwhile to achieve a dream (in this case, universal health care) was well made and so it gets the thumbs up from me.