Written by Uma Nada-Rajah

Directed by Gareth Nicholls

Review by Libby Hutton

Tron Theatre

Airy hospital curtains on a dimly lit stage are blown gently as a softly sung live cover of ‘You Can Have It All’ by George McCrae sounds above the drip-drip-drip of a ceiling leak. A nurse in scrubs frowns upwards at the expanding hole where moonlight is just peeking through. The calm before the storm. Moments later, a yelling man in tweed with a fence spike stuck in his buttocks is wheeled in face-down, and the action begins.

‘Black Hole Sign’, written by Uma Nada-Rajah portrays a fast-paced account of one night inside an understaffed NHS ward. Navigating the expanding hole in the ceiling, an incompetent student nurse (the only weakly-written character), mentally unstable patients and a man whose life expectancy is a mere few hours, the play illuminates a wide range of deeply stressful challenges that nurses face at work.

Interestingly, the hole itself doesn’t seem to cause too much of a panic and instead triggers a reaction of passivity; a metaphor perhaps for the nurses’ powerlessness in the face of a crumbling NHS. As dirt gathers on the floor, never to be cleaned up, the nurses do what they can to continue business as usual. And what is the alternative? They could hardly move to an empty ward; in this ward alone there are not enough beds for a dying man (Beruce Khan) to have his last night next to a window, too little nurses to administer Mr Turnbull’s (Martin Docherty) pain relief, or to supervise a delirious elderly woman (Ann Louise Ross) to the toilet, who resorts to defecating on the reception chair in a comically dark moment. As a young suicidal woman (Betty Valencia) so understandingly explains to one of her nurses; “you’re having to convince me that my life is worth living, but you’re having to do it in 2 minutes or less.”

The intention to portray this absurd juggle between professional procedures and the depth of care needed to ensure a human life is preserved is written a little loosely. Scenes of magic realism, enhanced by immersive noise in a surround sound system (sound design and composition by Michael John McCarthy) are a creative choice which reflects the incomprehensibility of the overwhelming task of saving lives. But the play could benefit from connecting stylised scenes with their following naturalistic events more tightly, to produce a throughline that is more closely aligned with the play’s message: there are not enough resources for nurses to enact their primary instinct of thorough care. The questions asked therefore, are: what do we want the NHS to look like, and who will be held accountable if the NHS does “fall down.”

In the case of the preventable suicide of the young woman, the Head Charge nurse, Crea (Helen Logan), takes accountability, and her consequence was discharge. Whilst she did make a mistake, she was an exceptional nurse: (“if you’re gonna make a cup of tea for someone on the last day of their life, then you better make it good.”) Crea, and the second nurse on shift (Dani Heron) were victims of a too-busy night to administer proper care. Whilst Crea was keen to avoid a political explanation, other characters and I would attribute a large proportion of this accountability to the systematic failings of the government in underfunding the NHS. I believe the playwright, a nurse herself, would want us to take this message as a warning; these failures will continue to occur if policy does not change, and the “black hole of greed” continues to place profits before people.

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