Tiger Country

Synopsis

Once you open the skin you're on your own. Enter the pressurised world of a busy London hospital, where tensions and emotions run high. In a profession that allows no room for mistakes, life and death are only a slip of a scalpel apart. Ambition and lust collide in this sharp-witted and insightful Hampstead Theatre debut from 'one of theatre's brightest talents' (The Guardian)

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 20 January 2011

Nina Raine’s third full length play – and she really is establishing herself now — Tiger Country is touted as a theatrical antidote to television hospital soaps like Casualty and Holby City, but it works best when it develops, in the second act, precisely the same sort of narrative threads in the busy onrush of a hospital stretched to the limit.

A bullying registrar from Bhopal, Vashti, is pulled up short when her elderly aunt is mistreated for fluid round the heart. The new doctor, Emily, finds her boyfriend slipping away as she gets caught up in a pitched battle between medics and surgeons. And the cynical doctor John is suddenly confronted with his own bad news diagnosis.

At first, Raine’s own production is a tumultuous, occasionally inaudible hubbub in a drastically reconfigured auditorium with an acting area as big as a football pitch, scratchy projections of indecipherable operations, two pairs of swing...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 3 February 2011:

My wife and I both work in the NHS and I have always said that if you want to have respect for doctors, never work for them. My wife's job is on a hospital ward and she can vouch for the accuracy of Tiger Country. There are excellent performances, particularly from Ruth Everett as a naive SHO and the increasingly impressive Adam James and Henry Lloyd-Hughes (who we met on the tube less than 10 minutes after the play ended). Nina Raine has created a very entertaining look at the reality of life in a hospital and there can be no doubting the depth of her research. The only crfiticism is that the play is very episodic with little narrative thread and too many loose ends - if was like watching a middle episode of a TV soap, albeit a very superior one....

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