In The Sick Of It

Edinburgh Fringe – Assembly

The National Health Service has been a significant part of the British national, social and political consciousness when it was first established in 1948. Since then, budget cuts, privatization, staff shortages, long waiting lists, underpayment of staff and the COVID-19 pandemic has knocked it off its footing. Wake The Beast’s In The Sick Of It is a verbatim theatre piece devised from interviews with NHS staff across different departments, about their experiences working for the NHS.  

The emotional punch of this show is where our familiarity with the issues in the NHS meets hearing directly from professionals who work there. All the information – facts and figures, on staffing, shortages, waiting times, etc – in one place, whilst powerful, is also extremely disheartening. It revolves around the staff experiences of shortages, the pandemic, patient care, racism and aggression, and how ill-equipped the NHS has become not only to look after patients, but its staff as well. Wake The Beast mix sound design of the interviews themselves with the hope of the NHS mission, government advice and scandals during the pandemic and live theatre to bring the immediacy of the system, where and how it is broken right to us.

“As an exploration of the systematic issues in the NHS, it’s brilliant; we have a visceral emotional reaction that oscillates between palpable anger, shock, horror, but it’s not quite the irreverent comedy that it’s set up to be. If we’re smiling, we’re smiling through tears.”

The reason why we have such a visceral reaction to it is due to the actors; Adam and Kemi. The immediacy of their performances and how everything on top of it builds to overwhelm our senses and create an atmosphere and emotional state that they are able to dictate and change at the drop of a hat.

This show is a farce because of how broken the system is.  And In The Sick Of It shows us how much worse it is than we may have thought. Whilst things are dramatised, these are real staff members, figures, recordings of politicians lying about parties whilst we see someone putting on a rubbish bag to use for PPE at the beginning of the pandemic. It is hard to watch, it is heavy, and there are a lot of intense emotions to be felt at every point of this show because it is relentless. Within all of this we are given space to laugh, to smile as Adam and Kemi, light moments of relief as staff recount letting off steam or patients with odd requests. They know how and when to bring a comedic note, when everything else becomes just too overwhelming, when the atmosphere becomes so oppressive that we feel defeated even just listening to these stories. As an exploration of the systematic issues in the NHS, it’s brilliant; we have a visceral emotional reaction that oscillates between palpable anger, shock, horror, but it’s not quite the irreverent comedy that it’s set up to be. If we’re smiling, we’re smiling through tears.

In The Sick Of It is harrowing, it’s horror story after horror story. We can’t help think about our own experience of the system, of trying to get care. There’s even a thankfulness and slight relief when we remember when we did get the care that we needed despite all of this, the doctors who helped us. But we also think of the time when we slept in a corridor of a hospital or got a room knowing that meant someone else didn’t. We think about our own long waits in the emergency room or a staff member who was just kind to us, the reports of people dying waiting for care. And also just the fear of knowing that one day we might need to use these services.  Because we all have experienced the NHS, and some of us remember a time before budget-cuts, when we could get the care that we needed when we needed it, and whatever horror we read about in the newspapers, does not compare to hearing what is going on from staff themselves. 

It’s the power of live theatre that we are able to experience all of this from the safety of a university lecture hall, but we feel as if we’re there in the sick of it, as it were. A challenging show for so early in the day, but well worth the watch. 

By Katerina Partolina Schwartz

Photo Credit: Nigel R. Glasgow