A clock ticks. Hand sanitiser sits on a desk. The Michael Pilch Studio Theatre is, for the next hour and a half, a doctor’s waiting room. It’s GREYJOY’s opening night.
Our playwright opens with “a bit of housekeeping.” First, she confirms that everyone is here to see GREYJOY, teasing that “there’s only one lemon in this play,” in a nod to Lighthouse Productions’ Lemons, which is also showing tonight. Then, Harper recaps her premise: five trainee doctors are sitting medical exams. They’re expected to brief a (fake) patient on their dad’s pending death. If this wasn’t metatheatrical enough – a character acting as a patient – there’s an added gimmick: “Our [actors who play the trainee] doctors have never read the script before.”
Harper has struck gold. Watching a trainee doctor (quite literally an improvising actor, literally reading from a physical script) fumble to deliver emotional news was deliciously comical. It’s a clear commentary on the state of healthcare but, beyond that, it’s also just plain funny.
Whilst the improv was a lot of fun, the play’s plot easily stood without the gimmick. Cait (Elizabeth ‘Zee’ Obeng) regularly volunteers to be the patient in these practice scenarios. Each doctor-in-training is tasked with briefing Cait – as the ‘patient’ Isabella – on the fact that her dad is going to die within the week. After each briefing, Cait ranks the trainee doctor on how successfully she feels they handled the interaction. Usually, these assessments would be overseen by a doctor called Lizzy, but she’s sick. Mina (Flora Tregear) fills in, furiously typing notes on the performance of each trainee doctor.
In between each assessment, Mina and Cait get to know one another. At first, they maintain a professional distance. Slowly, they breach the social confines of the workplace, diagnosing each other’s sources of unhappiness and prescribing treatments. Obeng is magnetic, beautifully transitioning between playing Cait and Cait’s patient personae, at times a grieving daughter, at others a woman experiencing mania. Tregear conveys Mina’s geeky idiosyncrasies well, offering a nerdy, insecure foil to the more self-assured Cait.
The downtrodden healthcare worker, neglected by those who should safeguard them, is by now a (regrettably) familiar trope. This is Going to Hurt (2022), the standout TV show starring Ambika Mod and Ben Whishaw, was one such treatment. Perhaps this is why GREYJOY’s character Martin (Mackey Pattenden) felt somewhat flat. Mina’s superior and bully, Martin struck me as a boring and one-dimensional addition. Martin’s pantomime villain was a far less complex antagonist than I would have expected to see in a play which is otherwise glittering.
Moments of humour were punctuated by grief-stricken monologues. One unnamed trainee doctor (Xander Lewis) delivers a memorable, defeated monologue about waiting for the death of his terminally ill mother. Themes of waiting emerged in Cait’s relationship with her sister, too, reminding the audience of both the tedium and the luxury of waiting around, and also signally that the theatre is itself a kind of waiting room.
Charlie Traynor’s sound design was subtle and effective. The echoing scuffle of shoes down a corridor emphasised the lack of privacy experienced in a hospital by staff and patients, even during Cait and Mina’s most private conversations. Libby Alldread’s lighting perhaps provided an unexpected remedy to this liminality, zoning off certain colours for specific interactions: red was reserved for when a character was overstepping a boundary; purple for whenever Cait’s sister was mentioned.
GREYJOY asks perceptive questions about authenticity and artificiality. Does it matter if your doctor means it when they express sympathy? Does it matter if they’re reading a script, especially if that script is effective at managing your emotions? Is it possible to provide genuine emotional support to a stranger in a time of need – and must a cup of tea always get involved?
Funny, touching, and with a hint of unexpected romance, GREYJOY is a stunning example of how intricate and thoughtful student theatre can be.
GREYJOY is showing at the Michael Pilch Studio Theatre from Wednesday 28th January until Saturday 31st January.
