What I'm Here For review: 'Audience breathless after perfectly-shaped play'
What I’m Here For, Tron Theatre, Glasgow ***** An excellent show finds a woman questioning her life, writes Joyce McMillan
The idea of a health service under stress looms so large in our domestic politics that it’s easy to forget that some of those pressures apply across the western world, as populations age, and staffing levels often fail to keep pace.
Josephine Eusebius’s 65-minute play What I’m Here For – based on extensive conversations with a working nurse in Denmark – tells the story of one wintry night in the life of a nurse called Flora, when her big city hospital is flooded with new admissions; and in this new co-production by Teater Katapult of Aarhus, and Glasgow’s leading international theatre-makers Vanishing Point, it has been transformed into an enthralling brief tone-poem of a theatrical piece, a meditation to set alongside Scottish playwright Uma Nada-Rajah’s recent Black Hole Sign, as a deep exploration of the inner world of a character caught in exactly the same hospital situation as Nada-Rajah described in that play.
So on a dark strip-lit set by Danish-Japanese designer Mai Katsume, we see a white-clad Flora, centre stage, wrestle with the competing demands of two patients in particular – the lonely young woman in Room 22 who has been given a false all-clear from a lethal brain tumour, and a demanding old lady in Room 33 who wants a softer pillow, and immediate attention from a doctor.
Shocked by doctors who are withholding the truth from the young woman until they can cover their own backs, Flora switches off her pager and gives vital time to delivering this terrible news, and to holding the young woman while she hears it; in the process, she neglects the annoying old lady, with tragic consequences. And at the end of this terrible shift, we see her on the hospital roof, sneaking a cigarette while the snowy city awakes, and facing the truth that this pain and guilt is part of the very stuff of her job.
All of this is delivered with a wonderful stillness and intensity in Matthew Lenton’s surtitled English-Danish production, which depends as much on Mark Melville’s brooding soundscape – with dialogue voiced on microphone by Laerke Schjaerff Engelbrecht’s poignant Flora and the four other female actors – as on the visual impact of its dark, dream-like set, impeccably lit by Simon Wilkinson. And the whole experience is of such a perfectly-shaped intensity that it seems to come and go in a moment; leaving the audience almost breathless, as they begin to absorb its impact.
What I’m Here For at Dundee Rep, 9-11 April, and the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 15-18 April
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