medical
Veronica Lee
Cat Cohen, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★★In Broad Strokes Cat Cohen paints a fascinating picture of events leading up to the stroke that could have killed her. Thankfully three years on she is now fully recovered – and from near tragedy comes this superb show.The hour is her trademark mix of standup and music (with Frazer Hadfield on piano) and Cohen delivers it in her usual deadpan, knowing style. You might forgive her should some sentimentality creep in, but no, her cuttingly ironic comedy shines through – “I had a stroke at 30: isn’t that so creative?”Describing the health Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
The German actor Leonie Benesch has an issue with erratic pacing in films. "I find it awful when a character talks and then there's a two-second pause before the dialogue continues," she says.Benesch's portrayal of a committed night nurse working in an understaffed hospital in Petra Volpe's Late Shift doesn't allow for such awkward silences. The taut medical drama plays out as a nerve-wracking thriller.The Guildhall-trained Benesch is probably best known to British audiences for co-starring with David Tennant in the Around the World in 80 Days miniseries and for playing Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Floria (the superb Leonie Benesch: The Crown; The Teachers’ Lounge; September 5) is a nurse, working the severely understaffed night shift in a Zurich hospital. She is constantly doing three things at once, sanitising her hands, snapping her gloves on and off, measuring medications into syringes, finding veins for IVs and saying, endlessly, “Ich komme gleich” (I’ll be there soon) or “Have you pain on a scale of one to ten?”Swiss writer-director Petra Volpe’s film is compulsively watchable and brilliantly paced and edited, with an exceptional soundtrack by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch (All of Us Read more ...
Robert Beale
Opera can take many forms and fulfil many purposes: this chamber opera by Zakiya Leeming and Sam Redway is about vaccination. Based on history, it has a story to tell and lessons to teach.“A new opera on medicine, memory and innovation” was the subtitle, and that sums up the themes it explores – but the abstractions are brought to life as aspects of the tale of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the early 18th century aristocrat whose experience of a Turkish public bath enabled her to discover and then promote the practice of inoculation (or, to be precise, variolation – introducing infected matter Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In 2012, the award-winning American writer Sarah Ruhl met a Yale playwriting student who became a special part of her life. Out of their friendship she created Letters from Max, a 2018 book of their correspondence, then a play performed in New York in 2023.On the page, it’s a piece with a level of diction befitting two poets who like to recite their latest work to each other, sometimes more like a poetry reading than a play. But interspersed is the sparky dialogue between the two, the skinny student in his early twenties and the established playwright, mother of three, two decades older. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The plays of David Ireland have a tendency to build to an explosion, after long stretches of caustic dialogue and very funny banter. The Fifth Step, though, is a gentler beast whose humour ends with a simple visual gag. Maybe because this is more personally sensitive territory?Ireland sets the piece in an AA meeting place, somewhere he got to know well in his early twenties in Glasgow. As props, there are just a few folding chairs and a refreshments table with paper cups. The sides of the performing space are raised, turning it into a kind of arena. There, a succession of bouts takes place Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following on from the first series of Malpractice in 2023, this second season again probes into issues of medical malfeasance and institutional corruption, in an environment where patient care frequently comes second to internal politics and self-preservation. The protagonist first time around was Niamh Algar’s Dr Lucinda Edwards, but this time it’s Tom Hughes as Dr James Ford, who works as a psychiatric registrar at the fictional Queen Mother’s University Hospital.Writer Grace Ofori-Attah had personal experience as an NHS psychiatrist, which has undoubtedly helped to lend the show a sense of Read more ...
graham.rickson
All We Imagine as Light focuses on the lives of three women in contemporary Mumbai; as shown by director Payal Kapadia, the city is arguably the film’s fourth major character. Kapadia eschews convention, her metropolis painted in muted colours with dark skies and heavy rain a constant.We first see Prabha (Kani Kusruti) on the long journey home to the cramped flat she shares with her younger colleague Anu (Divya Prabhu); as in many western cities, their key worker salaries aren’t sufficient to allow them to live a reasonable distance to their city centre hospital.Kusruti is an extraordinary Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s easy to see metaphors about the status of modern Georgia, once again threatened by the Russian boot, in its recent artistic output. So while there are no overt political allusions in director Dea Kulumbegashshvili’s April, at its core you sense a tacit and urgent debate about how to square your conscience with the “rules” that govern the country’s conduct.The heroine of the piece is Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an actual heroine of a sort. She’s an OB/GYN hospital doctor who risks her career by dispensing contraceptive pills and performing (illegal) abortions in remote villages for women in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Donald Rodney’s most moving work is a photograph titled In the House of My Father, 1997 (main picture). Nestling in the palm of his hand is a fragile dwelling whose flimsy walls are held together by pins. This tiny model is made from pieces of the artist’s skin removed during one of the many operations he underwent during his short life; sadly he died the following year, aged only 37.His body was crumbling under the onslaught of sickle cell anaemia, a disease that almost exclusively affects people of African descent and for which there is no known cure. In one of his notebooks, beside a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The phenomenal global success of Six began when two young writers decided to give voices to the wives of a powerful man, bringing them out of their silent tombs and energising them and, by extension, doing the same for the women of today. Its extraordinary popularity is a siren call to find forgotten women and reclaim their personalities, to give a theatrical second life to those to whom the historical record has denied a first. Indeed, Oh! Mary, also about President Lincoln's wife, is proving that point in New York now. Something of that desire lies behind painter, writer, playwright, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We open on one of those suburban American families we know so well from Eighties and Nineties sitcoms - they’re not quite Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, but they’re not far off. As usual, we wonder how Americans have so much space, such big fridges and why they’re always shouting up the stairs.But this squabbly, stereotypical family is not what it seems. Soon the mother is behaving oddly, there’s a “Here we go again” look in her husband’s eyes and the daughter withdraws, somewhat traumatised. Only the son, who has taken on a Puck-like status as an unreliable observer, appears at ease – Read more ...