Skip to main content
Advertise with the Morning Star
Tiger Country, Hampstead Theatre London
Hospital drama from 2014 resonates at a time of NHS crisis

TV SCHEDULES  reflect an apparently insatiable viewer appetite for hospital soaps and it's a brave playwright who tackles the genre in the theatre.

This online version of Nina Raine's play, which she also directed, in some ways reinvents the wheel in presenting a familiar scenario, with medical crises mixed in with the relationships of staff stressed by their work and emotional entanglements.

But time and events, as so often, exert their influence on audiences. The advent of the coronavirus must surely break through the comfortable fiction of  a TV series — locked-down online viewers are only too well aware of the heroic efforts of NHS staff to cope with what must seem an overwhelming crisis.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
FAT HAM
Theatre Review / 21 August 2025
21 August 2025

GORDON PARSONS is riveted by a translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy into joyous comedy set in a southern black homestead

Old Persian text
Book Review / 15 August 2025
15 August 2025

GORDON PARSONS is enthralled by an erudite and entertaining account of where the language we speak came from

2 gents
Theatre Review / 14 August 2025
14 August 2025

GORDON PARSONS endures heavy rock punctuated by Shakespeare, and a delighted audience

winters tale
Theatre review / 30 July 2025
30 July 2025

GORDON PARSONS advises you to get up to speed on obscure ancient ceremonies to grasp this interpretation of a late Shakespearean tragi-comedy

Similar stories
UN-NUANCED: Sophie Melville, Leander Deeny, Laura Whitmore i
Theatre Review / 6 April 2025
6 April 2025
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by characters so un-nuanced as to be unreal, a stereotypical plot and a conceptual vampire
Lizzie Watts and Andre Squire in Jane Upton’s (the) Woman
Theatre review / 19 February 2025
19 February 2025
SIMON PARSONS is discomfited by an unflichingly negative portrait of motherhood and its trials
NO THRILLS: East is South at Hampstead Theatre
Theatre review / 19 February 2025
19 February 2025
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a play about AI that results in a deadening disconnect for its audience
COMPLEX INNER LIVES: The cast of The Lonely Londoners
Theatre Review / 20 January 2025
20 January 2025
MARY CONWAY applauds a brilliant theatrical adaptation of Sam Selvon’s classic 1950s novel of oppression, betrayal and resilience