medical
Joanna Cannon: Breaking and Mending review - can you feel too much?Sunday, 06 October 2019Joanna Cannon was a wild card. She left school at 15 with one O-level and after various jobs, including working as a barmaid, she was given a place at medical school. The admissions professor accepted a wild card a year, someone whose path had been... Read more... |
Trust Me, Series 2 Finale, BBC One review - dodgy doctors and unreliable nursesWednesday, 08 May 2019Writer Dan Sefton’s four-part hospital drama reached a modestly satisfying conclusion as the phantom killer stalking the wards was finally unmasked, following the usual twists and misdirections obligatory in thrillerland. I felt quite pleased with... Read more... |
Leah Hazard: Hard Pushed review - a midwife's talesSunday, 05 May 2019This layered medical memoir by practicing midwife Leah Hazard unpacks riveting tales of all kinds of deliveries and is underpinned by distress at the parlous nature of the understaffed and overworked NHS.Medical tales (including Adam Kay’s This is... Read more... |
Mark Thomas, BAC review - impassioned polemic about the NHSThursday, 25 April 2019Mark Thomas issues a health warning for Check-Up: Our NHS at 70 at Battersea Arts Centre – “This show contains swearing, a video of an operation on a stomach and a description of being in A&E when a patient dies.” Indeed it... Read more... |
Trust Me, Series 2, BBC One review - hospital killer chillerWednesday, 17 April 2019Great, a new drama not by the Williams brothers. Instead it’s Dan Sefton’s second iteration of his medical thriller Trust Me, last seen in 2017 starring Jody Whittaker. Since she’s off being Doctor Who, the new series has a new cast, with John... Read more... |
Lavinia Greenlaw: In the City of Love’s Sleep review - curated livesSunday, 23 September 2018Iris is a museum conservator with a pair of pre-adolescent daughters and a failing marriage. Raif is a widower and an academic who, since writing a book on curiosity cabinets a decade ago, has quietly sunk into a kind of irrelevance. Both have... Read more... |
Allelujah!, Bridge Theatre review - hilarious but dark, darker, darkestFriday, 20 July 2018The NHS is us. For decades our national identity has been bandaged together with the idea, and reality, of a health service that is free at the point of delivery. Such an object of myth and pride cries out for comic treatment, and now the spritely... Read more... |
Summer 1993 review - the tenderest fabric of childhoodFriday, 13 July 2018Carla Simón’s debut feature Summer 1993 is a gem of a film by any standards, but when you learn that its story is based closely on the thirtysomething Catalan director’s own early life, its intimacy becomes almost overwhelming. It has at its heart a... Read more... |
Christie Watson: The Language of Kindness review - tender memoir, impassioned indignationSunday, 06 May 2018Anecdotal story-telling wrapped up in hypnotic prose, Christie Watson’s narrative is a gentle, emotive five-part layered package of reflection and indignation. It is part memoir-autobiography, part history of nursing (Indian, Greek, Byzantine and... Read more... |
Barbara Ehrenreich: Natural Causes review - counterintuitive wisdom on the big issuesSunday, 15 April 2018“Wham bam, thank you, ma’am” might be one response to this polemical, wry, hilarious and affecting series of counterintuitive essays by one of the most original and unexpected thinkers around. Barbara Ehrenreich has described herself as a “myth-... Read more... |
Trauma, ITV, review - surgically imprecise revenge dramaThursday, 15 February 2018When you’re hot, you’re hot. In the past two years Mike Bartlett has had the following works staged or broadcast: Wild, a play about Edward Snowden at Hampstead Theatre; Albion, a three-hour neo-Chekhovian state-of-the-nation play at the Almeida; an... Read more... |
DVD: The Death of Louis XIVTuesday, 21 November 2017Albert Serra has earned himself the directorial moniker “the Catalan king of stasis”, and nothing in The Death of Louis XIV is going to dispel such a reputation – if anything, he has honed that characteristic approach further, concentrating this... Read more... |