(seen at the afternoon performance on 7th February 2024)
After almost 25 years working in theatre, it is not that unusual for the monkey to see someone on stage and think “I know them.” This play, however, is the first time it has seen someone on stage and thought “but my mother worked with her at her office in the service.”
Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s writing and Debra Baker’s performance as Angela, bored NHS admin drone for CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) on the fourth floor of a busy London hospital are reality.
Angela plays the usual NHS game, building her one-woman fortress against ever-changing mismanagement and rising chaos within an over-stretched system. Boss Gary is a remote incompetent figure, the doctors are demanding and the patients are sorted into “urgent” (might be seen) and “standard” (you can guess) cases.
Aspiring Occupational Therapist Jay (Denzel Baidoo) is 20, I.T. literate and ready to move Angela’s office into the 21st century if she will let him. Eager and inexperienced in equal measure, hasty decisions are regretted - the impact of his actions only later biting painfully hard.
As credible as Baker, the pair edge towards uneasy truce, discovering something in each other which belies her indifference to her job and his idealism - which she tries to puncture. Nuanced and impressively detailed from both actors.
Newcomer Dolly Webb is Beth, a troubled 17-year-old shortly to be evicted from CAMHS and moved (if she ever gets up the waiting list) to adult mental health services. Jay’s attempts to help her are his downfall. Sulky, insecure, vibrant, Webb does well in a neatly written role.
Alys Whitehead’s set could have been imported directly from any local hospital. Piles of paper, dodgy computers, antique fax machine and a couple of blue padded chairs – on with arms, one without.
Perhaps squeezing a little too much in (the miniature waiting room), and turning a tad whimsical with the wall-mounted dustbin, it is real enough that an audience member absent-mindedly disposed of her coffee cup in the set’s bin on the way out.
Laura Howard’s depressing strip-lighting complements the thin carpets. Interestingly, it took a messy lighting cue to realise there were auxiliary lights in use, making Howard’s plot notable for authenticity.
Max Pappenheim gives us realistic sounds of hospital life – from phones to the smashing of objects we’d rather not know about, adding to the atmosphere and covering lengthy scene changes with evocative noise.
Ed Madden knows to direct with the same realism as acting and set. The pace is that of office workers, few pauses are for dramatic effect and he has drawn the best out of the trio as well as making a few cuts to the published text (in the script / programme book) which correctly improve the pace.
The writer herself perhaps veers a little off-course towards the end of the second act and into the third, but surprisingly neatly and without artifice brings the three stories to a credible conclusion.
An even-handed tale, rather than a sweeping indictment of NHS mental health services, the strength is in recognising that the most important level of all is the interface between those seeking help and those who need it most.
“This Might Not Be It” as a way to do those things, but it is an astute enough piece of observation surely, to spark a very important debate. See it, to become part of it – particularly if you are a healthcare administrator.
4 stars.
Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz. Used by kind permission of the Bush Theatre.