A black hole sign is the dark area of a CT scan that suggests a haemorrhage on the brain. A black hole could also be the gap that has opened up in the ceiling of a windowless A&E department, where a drip becomes a torrent, a metaphor for a crumbling NHS. And a “black hole of greed” is what playwright Uma Nada-Rajah sees in a system in which profit frequently comes before health.
As a staff nurse who works in critical care, Nada-Rajah writes with authority. All her characters, whether it is the recovering alcoholic with hours to live (Beruce Khan), the self-harming young woman who claims to have had a fall (Betty Valencia), the delirious octogenarian who thinks she is at a 1970s disco (Ann Louise Ross) or the man with a spike in his buttocks (Martin Docherty), have the ring of messy truth.
So too does the playwright’s black humour. There are a lot of attempts at care in this overstretched ward but no room to be sentimental. This is where human bodies end up, with all their frailty, pain and incontinence, and it takes pragmatism to deal with them.
That creates many laughs in a play that unfolds like a Brechtian parable of cause and effect: the more pressure bearing down on the nurses the more inevitably something will go fatally wrong. The senior charge nurse Crea (Helen Logan), her over-committed acolyte Ani (Dani Heron) and their clueless student Lina (Valencia again) are an accident waiting to happen.
It is a shaming message, in a production fluidly staged by Gareth Nicholls for the Tron and Edinburgh’s Traverse. If its imaginative collision of pathos, comedy, polemic and drug-induced dream sequence creates an uneven pace and some bumpy shifts in tone, it is also a clear-eyed plea for cash as well as compassion.
At Tron theatre, Glasgow, until 4 October. Then at Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, 8–18 October.
