Black Hole Sign (Playscript)

Uma Nada-Rajah’s play seems in many ways like an elegy for an NHS ideal of universal care that is slowly bleeding to death after years of underfunding and creeping privatisation; and in a single 90-minute movement, her central narrative charts the end of a nursing career built around the fulfilment of that post-war promise. Yet Nada-Rajah – who is herself a critical care staff nurse in NHS – cannot help also observing, and recording, the sheer vitality and intensity of human experience that still persists in the NHS, and the remarkable enduring strength of an idea that millions still cherish. And between these two impulses, her play achieves a rare and subtle balance between tragedy and comedy, despair and faith, that tastes like reality itself.

Uma Nada-Rajah writes with polemical force from firsthand experience of a health system on its knees . . . All her characters have the ring of messy truth. So too does the playwright’s black humour . . . a play that unfolds like a Brechtian parable of cause and effect.

Exciting, tightly constructed and often very funny.

Despite its serious and tragic subject matter, [Black Hole Sign] is laced with comic touches that are often mordantly witty and satirically insightful . . . Nada-Rajah’s fine play honours our NHS staff, while offering sobering insights into the present condition of the service.

The beauty of this thoughtful and humane work is that it depicts, with striking believability, the myriad pressures that can bring an NHS ward to breaking point. This may not seem like a basis for comedy, but the play is peppered with moments of bleak humour . . . Black Hole Sign is an intelligently complex play that bears often funny, incisive witness to both the remarkable work of NHS staff and the precarious condition of Britain’s most beloved institution.