Black Hole Sign at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre – review

Black Hole Sign is, on the surface, a fairly conventional drama about the state of the NHS. It’s set in a hospital ward during a night shift at a time when the service is overstretched and the nurses are stressed out – partly due to the strain on their resources and partly due to troubles in their home lives. So far, so Casualty.

Then, however, a hole appears in the roof, one which grows bigger as the play progresses and lets in the detritus of the outside world. But is it just a hole, a maintenance drama in a world where PFI private contractors deal with the fabric of the building; or is it a (fairly clumsy) metaphor for something darker intruding onto the ward? At the same time, a young man is admitted with a catastrophic bleed on the brain, known as a “Black Hole Sign”, and a delirious elderly lady seems to see both the future and the past while foretelling dark truths.

And then suddenly, she doesn’t. Part of the problem with Uma Nada-Rajah’s new play is that it can’t quite choose between the symbolism and the naturalism. Therefore, it contains doses of both and ends up not quite satisfying either. I was really hoping that the play would embrace its magical realist elements and say something profound about the NHS, its people and its role in British society but, once a surreal drug-induced dream sequence is out of the way, it forgets all of that and turns back into a regular drama that in its final sequences ties up all the loose ends in a neat narrative bow.

That’s disappointing. However, it’s redeemed by the energy of the script, which is exciting, tightly constructed and often very funny. Nada-Rajah, who is a staff nurse in real life, splices together narrative lines to deal simultaneously with two timelines, addressing both the night in the hospital and the outcome of a misconduct hearing. Several key details are held back to increase suspense, and when the big reveal comes, it’s done sensitively and powerfully.

Most of that is thanks to the performances, which are uniformly strong. At the centre is Helen Logan as Crea, the staff nurse in charge, who carries the weight of the world on her shoulders while refusing to give up, buoyed by her belief in the NHS and its principles. Dani Heron is an excellent foil as the younger nurse who is torn between her duty to the ward and her care for the individual with the brain bleed. He is played with humanity by Beruce Khan. Both Betty Valencia and Martin Docherty play a range of characters with impressive distinctiveness, and Ann Louise Ross threatens to steal every scene she’s in as the delirious pensioner.

Director Gareth Nicholls and designer Anna Orton bring the hospital setting to life with visual cues that everyone will recognise, and the pacing is tight so that the 90-minute running time (without an interval) flies by. In a fairly unpleasant instance of life imitating art, there was a medical incident in the audience that had to stop the play at one point. I’m told the person was fine afterwards, but it’s a testament to the professionalism and focus of the performers that that wasn’t the most memorable thing about the evening.