THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Lucy Kirkwood
Donmar Warehouse, Covent Garden, London, until April 13, 2024
Plays about the founding of the NHS are like buses, you wait ages and suddenly along come two. Michael Sheen is incarnating the founder, Nye Bevin, in Nye (currently in previews at the National Theatre) while the Donmar gets in first with this excellent new play by Lucy Kirkwood, which fuses the story of a fictional female GP in at the founding of the NHS with a vivid Brief Encounter like romance, executed with daring cinematic fluidity by directors Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee.
Keeley Hawes, who could have stepped straight out of a 1950s Rank movie classic, is superb as Iris Elcock who juggles her roles as a GP, a prospective MP, a wife and a mother. She has to reckon with the choices she's made in both her private and professional lives, at the very moment the NHS is being launched and she is instrumental to it.
Her situation is compounded in that her husband Julian (Tom Goodman-Hall), is also a GP and votes against the NHS, as he's suspicious of the "socialists". An embittered and wounded war veteran he feels he's more than done his bit. Kirkwood's play is never a polemic and among Iris's patients she has to patiently listen to chippy critics, both rich and poor, who mistrust an interfering state and can't quite grasp what it might actually mean.
Then on a train back from London, after a tiring day of campaigning, she meets George Blythe, a debonair actor oozing old school Hollywood charm. Jack Davenport is perfectly cast, bringing to Blythe a slightly sad edge. He's returning home from Hollywood where he's made a career for himself playing 'rotters', cads and Nazis. It's chalk meets cheese. "Do you believe in anything?" she asks.
But soon she's checking him out in the fanzines in her doctor's waiting room and engineering a meeting. He embodies the opposite of all her daily grind and the antidote she needs to her sexless marriage. While he's unmoved by her virtuousness, he goes from admiring to adoring her and we're soon in Brief Encounter land.
Later on, we learn what's keeping him in England and the plot (all perfectly paced by Kirkwood) spins to the big launch day for the NHS and Iris's by-election date, when her husband finds out about the affair, and fateful decisions have to be made.
By adding a love triangle Kirkwood deftly avoids the (well staged) political shenanigans around the creation of the NHS becoming a dry polemic. Fly Davis' design concept, built on use of the revolve and a huge video screen (by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom who did Sunset Boulevard) renders the world azure blue – the furniture, the props, the light shade. It's as if we're in a film and on a set at the same time, Steadicam operators project close ups for us all in luscious b&w. The contrast between the England of ration books and the world of the silver screen couldn't be more pointed, the latter providing an essential balm to the nation's collective wounds.
Kirkwood too doesn't fall into the lazy trap of making these characters 'relevant' or softening their period language. Young audience members shuddered at some of the attitudes. Instead, by locating us firmly in this world she reminds us of what was at stake and how amazing the creation of the NHS and Atlee's building boom were. When irascible Julian grumbles that the NHS will soon fail, she retorts "Then the idea will not have failed, we will have failed the idea".
Tom Goodman-Hall, Siobhan Redmond and Pearl Mackie are an absolute triumph as the ensemble, each embodying about half a dozen supporting characters and delineating each perfectly, but the night belongs to Keeley Hawes who creates an unforgettable, complex, heroine.
