Theatre review: The Human Body

Plays can take a while to go through development and writing and get to production, often ending up with similar ideas making it to the stage at the same time. I wonder if it was the sound of people banging pots and pans every Thursday night four years ago that now gives us a batch of plays about the founding of the National Health Service? I didn't have any particular preconceptions about how Lucy Kirkwood would take on the subject, but it certainly wouldn’t have been something quite as camp as the Donald and Margot Warehouse's The Human Body turns out to be, filtering the birth of the NHS through Brief Encounter. It's 1948 and Dr Iris Elcock (Keeley Hawes) juggles being a GP with being a local Councillor, prospective MP in an upcoming by-election, and right hand woman to a Labour MP (Siobhán Redmond.) She's also a wife and mother, although despite her reassurances to the press that she's also the perfect housewife this is a role she's less of a natural in.

Her husband Julian (Tom Goodman-Hill) is also a GP, but badly injured in the War and in chronic pain, his more pessimistic, misanthropic nature comes to the fore when he admits he plans to vote against the creation of the NHS, Iris and her party's most ambitious and personal project.

On a train journey from London back to her home in Shropshire, Iris meets George (Jack Davenport,) a B-list movie star visiting his mother, who's a patient of hers. He’s left his actress wife (Pearl Mackie) back in LA, and as the two start to find excuses to keep bumping into each other flirtation turns to something more serious. The scenes that follow them are played more or less as a straightforward romance, although there are links to the overarching theme in their conversations – Iris is passionate about the project she’s dedicated the last few years of her life to, while George, who was in America during the War, has some distance and something of a sardonic view of the idea of British exceptionalism that grew over those years.

Surrounding this and the wider story of the pressures Iris is under are scenes that remind us of the urgent necessity for a public medical system – while comfortable GPs opposed to the NHS grumble about being paid less or being sent to practices they don’t like, Iris encounters poorer communities whose situation is still positively Victorian in the mid-20th century: Women and children dying in childbirth or of easily preventable illnesses and people living in chronic pain for years, all because getting someone to look at it comes with a price tag they can’t afford. There’s even a nod to the Windrush generation coming to the UK to help prop up the service.

It’s not exactly subtle, but that’s where the surprisingly high element of camp comes in. Kirkwood’s script is full of funny, sometimes bitchy one-liners (if Redmond seems wasted in a number of small supporting roles, her scenes as Julian’s acidic sister make better use of her talents) and there’s a sense of panic to Iris’ dealings with her family: While there’s no question mark over the fact that she loves her daughter, she is utterly incapable of relating to a child, and their exchanges are snappy and impatient – her outburst about donkeys with sad eyes borders on the surreal. And Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee’s production only dials this archness up to 11.

On Fly Davis’ all-blue set, the action is constantly on a slow revolve, but when we get to the scenes of Iris and George’s building romance we go full throttle into the Brief Encounter allusion. The stage turns into an old-fashioned movie studio with Joshua Pharo’s lighting rigs descending from the skies, while the stage crew follow the actors’ intimate conversation with steadicams. Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom’s video design projects this as a live black-and-white movie onto the back wall, and I’ve got to hand it to Davenport and especially Hawes for the way they oh-so-gently tip their performances into 1940s cinematic melodrama, without losing the connection with their other scenes.

Another notably arch touch is the running theme that, any time it looks like Iris might be thinking about cheating on her husband, a different supporting character played by Goodman-Hill will be hovering somewhere in the background. Like so many shows The Human Body is too long and could have made its point even with some significant editing, but I’ve got to admire it for the way it approaches its potentially dry history by framing it in the popular entertainment style of the time – with enough of a wink to the audience not to take itself too seriously, but not so much that it forgets to make its points.

The Human Body by Lucy Kirkwood is booking until the 13th of April at the Donmar Warehouse.

Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner