When theatre director
Max Stafford-Clark suffered a massive stroke in 2006, his artistic
and personal partner, playwright Stella Feehily, became the
theatrical firebrand and former artistic director of the Traverse
Theatre's full-time carer. Eight years on, the accidental result of
this is This May Hurt A Bit, an angry, funny and utterly humane
dissection of the NHS in light of the Westminster coalition
government's ongoing attempt to destroy one of the UK's greatest
assets.
“We used the NHS
regularly,” says Feehily, whose play arrives at the Traverse next
week in a production by a recovered Stafford-Clark for Out of Joint,
the company he co-founded in 1998. “We had the patient experience,
the near death experience and the chaos experience. We've seen the
food, the bad, and not the ugly, but pretty close, but I would never
have thought about writing a play about the NHS without that
experience.”
This May Hurt A Bit
charts the experience of an elderly patient who has grown up with the
NHS and other liberties forged by the post World War Two welfare
state, and who is suddenly forced to face up to its institutional
decimation. As well as being visited by her family, Aneurin Bevan,
the visionary socialist MP regarded as the architect of the NHS, also
appears in a play that, while undoubtedly political, possesses a very
human heart.
“On the one hand you
can call the play a comedy drama that's about a divided family”
says Feehily. “On the other hand you can say it's a political
drama that looks at a government that's more concerned with selling
off the NHS to big business than serving patients. If you're going to
write a play, it has to be an entertainment, but if it's a play about
the NHS, it's going to be emotional, and you can't sit on the fence.”
One of the things
Feehily encountered in her researches was the results of the UK
coalition government's much maligned Health and Social Care Act,
which was passed in 2012, and which to its detractors looks very much
like privatisation of the NHS. Also of note was Health Secretary
Jeremy Hunt's attempts to cut services in the emergency and maternity
services at Lewisham Hospital were decreed unlawful by the courts
twice.
“We're supposed to be
living in a democracy,” Feehily says, “but when things like that
happen, it doesn't feel like it is. I find it quite spooky, and I
don't want to believe it's as Machiavellian as it is, but it's hard
not to. It's amazing that Scotland has managed to keep the market out
the way it has. The politicians in Scotland must realise that the NHS
isn't about shareholders making money by cutting funds and staff, and
bleeding services dry,. Of course, there are problems with health
services all over the world, and no-one's saying it's perfect, but
that's how it is with life and death.”
This May Hurt A Bit,
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, April 8-12
The Herald, April 1st 2014
ends
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