Black Hole Sign review – NHS’s critical condition examined with dark humour | Theatre
A The sign of the black hole is the dark area of a computed tomography that suggests hemorrhage on the brain. A black hole could also be the gap that opened up to the ceiling of a window without window, where a drop of drop becomes a torrent, a metaphor of a ruined NHS. And a “black hole in greed” is what the playwright Uma Nada-Rajah sees in a system in which profit goes frequently before health.
As a staff who works in intensive care, Nada-Rajah writes with authority. All her characters, whether alcoholic convalescence with hours to live (Berruce Khan), the young Auto-Harming woman who claims to have had a fall (Betty Valence), the delirious octogenarian who thinks she is in a disco from the 1970s (Ann Louise Ross) or the man with an epis in her buttocks (Martin Docher), reassured the truth.
The same goes for the black humor of the playwright. There are a lot of attempted care in this too wide service but no room to be sentimental. This is where human bodies end up, with all their fragility, their pain and their incontinence, and it takes pragmatism to face them.
This creates many laughs in a room that takes place like a Brechiale parable of cause and effect: the more pressure on the nurses, the more inevitably something is fatally badly. The senior nurse Crea (Helen Logan), his acolyte too committed Ani (Dani Heron) and their student without any idea Lina (Valencia again) are an accident that awaits to perform.
It is a shameful message, in a production staged in a fluid way by Gareth Nicholls for the crossing of Tron and Edinburgh. If his imaginative collision of pathos, comedy, controversy and dream sequence induced by drugs creates an unequal rhythm and some bumpy changes of tone, it is also a pleading with clear eyes for money as well as compassion.
