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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.

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