Black Hole Sign Review – Nhs’s Critical Condition Examined With Dark Humour

A achromatic spread motion is nan acheronian area of a CT scan that suggests a haemorrhage connected nan brain. A achromatic spread could besides beryllium nan spread that has opened up successful nan ceiling of a windowless A&E department, wherever a drip becomes a torrent, a metaphor for a crumbling NHS. And a “black spread of greed” is what playwright Uma Nada-Rajah sees successful a strategy successful which profit often comes earlier health.

Operating theatre … Helen Logan successful Black Hole Sign. Photograph: Mihaela Bodlovic

As a unit caregiver who useful successful captious care, Nada-Rajah writes pinch authority. All her characters, whether it is nan recovering alcoholic pinch hours to unrecorded (Beruce Khan), nan self-harming young female who claims to person had a autumn (Betty Valencia), nan delirious octogenarian who thinks she is astatine a 1970s disco (Ann Louise Ross) aliases nan man pinch a spike successful his hips (Martin Docherty), person nan ringing of messy truth.

So excessively does nan playwright’s achromatic humour. There are a batch of attempts astatine attraction successful this overstretched ward but nary room to beryllium sentimental. This is wherever quality bodies extremity up, pinch each their frailty, symptom and incontinence, and it takes pragmatism to woody pinch them.

That creates galore laughs successful a play that unfolds for illustration a Brechtian parable of origin and effect: nan much unit base down connected nan nurses nan much inevitably thing will spell fatally wrong. The elder complaint caregiver Crea (Helen Logan), her over-committed acolyte Ani (Dani Heron) and their clueless student Lina (Valencia again) are an mishap waiting to happen.

It is simply a shaming message, successful a accumulation fluidly staged by Gareth Nicholls for nan Tron and Edinburgh’s Traverse. If its imaginative collision of pathos, comedy, polemic and drug-induced dream series creates an uneven gait and immoderate bumpy shifts successful tone, it is besides a clear-eyed plea for rate arsenic good arsenic compassion.

• At Tron theatre, Glasgow, until 4 October. Then astatine Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, 8–18 October.