What I'm Here For: Hospital drama to show nurses under 'intense pressure'
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A new show from Vanishing Point and Denmark’s Katapult Theatre reflects on the overstretched state of 21st century health services, writes Joyce McMillan
When director Matthew Lenton’s latest show opened in the Danish city of Aarhus, three weeks ago, one critic waxed philosophical, as well as lyrical. “Art increasingly reflects itself, rather than the society around it,” wrote the iScene news website. “But every now and then, the two go hand in hand.”
It’s a blending of superb, innovative aesthetics with strong social awareness that Matthew Lenton has often achieved in his acclaimed international theatre work, since he founded his Vanishing Point company in Glasgow 27 years ago. Few who saw it will ever forget how his brilliant 2020 version of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis - co-produced with an Italian company - foreshadowed the coming Covid pandemic; last year’s multiple award-winning Confessions Of A Shinagawa Monkey, created with Japan’s Kanagawa Arts Theatre, raised poignant and timely questions about the boundary between an ever more rapacious and self-absorbed humankind, and the earth’s other creatures.
And now, Vanishing Point are about to work their magic again, with their new show What I’m Here For, co-produced with Katapult Theatre of Aarhus. “It all started in 2023, when I saw Katapult’s show The Insider at the Fringe,” says Lenton, remembering Katapult’s Scotsman Fringe First winning solo show about a corporate whistleblower, complete with technically dazzling perspex cube set.
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“I just loved the visual boldness of it, the theme, the approach,” says Lenton, “and when I ran into the director later that day, I suggested we talk about working together. We were just immediately on the same wavelength.” The result is this new show, written by Danish writer Josephine Eusebius and performed by an all-female cast of five, one playing the lead character Flora and the other four acting as a kind of chorus, sometimes within Flora’s own mind.
Like the recent new Scottish play Black Hole Sign, by Uma Nada-Rajah, What I’m Here For reflects on the intense pressure on overstretched 21st century health services, and the toll it takes on senior nurses often forced to take life and death decisions shaped by constant shortages of staff, space and resources.
In What I’m Here For, though, the play evolves through an intense introspective meditation, in which Flora - played by Danish actress Laerke Schjaerff Engelbrecht - considers her own actions during a long and traumatic night shift. “This is a subject very close to my heart, and a much more verbal show than some of our work,” says Lenton. “And of course it is in two languages - the text has been translated several times, back and forth, as our Danish and Scottish-based actors worked on it, and brought their own perspectives to it.
“English and Danish are quite similar languages, and most Danish people speak good English; so it is perhaps easier to move between the languages, in terms of sound and of culture. It has been a fascinating process; and of course despite the very serious subject, we hope that the show has plenty of humour and humanity too, as well as being formally exciting.”
Lenton says that he sometimes fears that his kind of theatre - ambitious and beautiful mid-scale international work, with casts of at least five or six, and cutting-edge design and technical presentation - is becoming an endangered species in Scotland. “Some theatres say they just can’t afford to take a chance on our shows the days,” says Lenton. “They’re not musicals, they’re not always upbeat, and the form and approach keeps evolving, with every new project we tackle.
“So far, though, we are still able to build the vital creative relationships we need and value, with wonderful companies across Europe and beyond. And we’re really looking forward to bringing What I’m Here For to Glasgow, Dundee and Edinburgh this spring. The audiences in Denmark this month responded brilliantly to it; and although the experience of it here is bound to be slightly different, we hope that audiences here in Scotland will love it too.”
What I’m Here For is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 1-4 April; Dundee Rep, 9-11 April; and the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 15-18 April.
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