Musical comic Adam Kay is a former doctor, of obstetrics and gynaecology – or “brats and twats” as he demurely puts it. His new show (from which a book has been commissioned) now addresses that career, partly for political reasons, as his blistering denouement makes clear. Those closing 10 minutes are tonally a thing apart from what precedes them: an emotionally naked disclosure of a career-ending incident, turned politically blunt clarion call for the staff of our beleaguered NHS. It doesn’t even pretend to be comedy, and makes a mockery of aesthetic judgment.
It’s stirring stuff; Jeremy Hunt should be fed this show on a drip. Even its main section – blackly comic extracts from Kay’s hospital diary, intercut with punning songs – counters the Tory claim that striking junior doctors are in it for the money. Here, we find our diarist missing Christmases, cancelling longed-for holidays and sacrificing relationships at the altar of medicine. He meets the eccentricities and idiocies of the British public with infinite patience and an infinitesimally raised eyebrow, and daily endures sights – geysers of patients’ blood; “the worst penis I had ever seen” – that would make lesser mortals (critics, say) quail.
Kay’s journal entries are spliced with hit songs given medical makeovers: a few droll musical one-liners (The Girl from Ipanema becomes The Girl With Emphysema); an (over-)running gag punning on Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. The diary-and-ditties combination is always entertaining; the closing cri de coeur is electrifying.
• At the Soho theatre, London, until 15 April. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
