For a surgeon, tiger country is when you have to stick a knife in a patient close to an arterial point knowing that one slip will cause death. But, in Nina Raine’s engrossing and enjoyable play, it is also the entire A&E department in a busy hospital. And the tigers are definitely not the patients, but the surgeons – a motley crew of overeducated, overworked, under-resourced, frail human beings dealing with their own inadequacies, troubled relationships and an NHS stretched to the limits.
With almost every day bringing fresh dispatches about the strains facing the NHS, Raine’s neatly acted play makes a timely return to Hampstead, where it sold out in 2011. Not that you are going to find out much about the structural deficiencies or labyrinthine bureaucratic intricacies of the organisation, or indeed much analysis of the way politicians use the NHS as a political football.
This is classy soap, but it’s very nicely done with Raine confidently directing and overlaying her play with the choreography of everyday life in A&E, where even a failed resuscitation is accompanied by a brutal physical poetry. The show is excellent on all the tolls that working in A&E takes. As one more experienced doctor, himself dealing with a serious health worry, tells a junior colleague: she has to learn to live with patients dying. She will make mistakes.
The narrow focus means that nurses and administrators don’t get a look in, and even the patients are mostly mere “slabs of meat” as one doctor describes them. But it’s a gripping account, particularly in the second half, and ensures you empathise with those on the frontline even as it makes you wonder whether we train the right people as doctors and whether a hierarchical career path that owes much to the public-school fagging system is long outmoded.
• Until 17 January. Box office: 020-7722 9301. Venue: Hampstead theatre.
• Tiger Country at Hampstead Theatre: buy top price tickets for £15.
