Anna Burnside reviews a black comedic look at the NHS.
The ominous sounding ‘black hole sign’ is a shadow on a CT scan, indicating a bleed on the brain. This is not a good thing.
In Uma Nada-Rajah’s black comedy, which draws heavily on her own experience as a staff nurse, it does triple duty, referring to a hole in the ceiling of the ward and the decrepit state of the NHS itself.
It’s also the diagnosis for Iain Hopper, a recovering alcoholic played with great humanity by Beruce Khan. His impending death drives a drama that centres round a shift from hell in a ward that’s overstretched, understaffed and falling to bits in every way possible.
Staff nurse Crea (Helen Logan) is keeping the place, and herself, together with old fashioned nursing values and chocolate. Ani (Dani Heron) is younger, torn between her vocation and her desire to have fun and earn money, cleaning pools in Alicante if necessary. Klutzy student nurse Lina (Betty Valencia) is chaos in a blue tunic.
Together they are in charge of a fragile young woman with mysterious cuts and bruises, an angry chap with a railing spike in his buttock and a wonderful Ann Louise Ross as Tersia, a superannuated party girl whose UTI has convinced her that it’s still 1970s and she is on a big night out.
Billy the porter (Martin Docherty) brings the politics as he wheels in another patient. His character is too vocal on how great the NHS is - the rest of the play shows this: he does not need to tell us in so many words.
That’s a script problem, not a cast problem. Under Gareth Nicholls’ direction, they do a grand job of bringing Nada-Rajah’s everyward to life. And if it ends neatly, if not exactly happily, no one can blame the playwright for treasuring any glimpse of optimism in the hellscape of our heath service.
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Black Hole Sign performs at the Tron until October 4, 2025. It then transfers to the Traverse Edinburgh (October 8-18, 2025).
Photo by Mihaela Bodlovic.
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