‘As good as playing in front of a packed house’: the actors who perform for stroke victims

IIn 2000, theatre director Caroline Smith was nursing her brother through a terminal illness and found that reading to him was a wonderful source of stimulation. She promptly set up a charity that takes professional actors into hospitals to read poems and stories to stroke survivors. Almost a quarter of a century later InterAct Stroke Support operates across the UK, with a year ago it made its first foray into Northern Ireland, where Ciarán Hinds led a patient meeting day at Whiteabbey Hospital in Belfast.

My own interest in InterAct was piqued by several things: I live close to Caroline and her actor husband, Christopher Ravenscroft; I entered the charity’s recent short story competition, which was judged by Margaret Drabble; and I have a natural curiosity about the many things actors do when they’re not on stage or screen. So when I was invited to see InterAct in action on a sweltering afternoon at London’s Charing Cross Hospital, I jumped at the chance.

I was met by Emma D’Inverno, a Scottish actress who has appeared in numerous TV series, including Doctor Who, Taggart and Rebus, and who I last saw on stage in a play by James Bridie at the Finborough Theatre in London. She has been with InterAct since the beginning, is currently the training coordinator, and gave me the lowdown.

InterAct, she told me, “currently employs 127 actors who work in 20 hospitals and 32 stroke clubs around the country. Although the actors do it for love, we pay them £35 for a two-hour session. The way it works is that hospital staff draw up a list of patients who need help and the actors work with them one-on-one. This requires training, so a new recruit will shadow an actor for at least two sessions. We also give the actors a reader’s guide, which sorts stories and poems into different categories: a typical example might include animal stories, crime, food, songs and sports. After each session, the reader will also write down in a folder how it went, so we have a record of the patient’s progress. But we are completely reliant on private funding. For example, I recently wrote to a Scottish company, Tunnock’s Teacakes, who generously gave us £10,000 which funded a whole year’s work in Glasgow.”

A lecture to a patient at Whiteabbey Hospital in Belfast. Photo: Gill Heppell

I went to a stroke unit where Barbara Wilshere, who leads a core team of eight actors at Charing Cross, was reading to a patient. Like many actors, Barbara has appeared in a number of hospital series, including Casualty, Doctors and Peak Practice, so she knows how to play a medic, but I was impressed by her ability to connect with a patient. When I arrived, she was reading a poem about the environment from a book by Brian Bilston. One line in particular struck me: “They can’t cut down the rainforest fast enough to keep up the supply of cheeseburgers.” The patient, who has a keen love of poetry, nodded quietly in agreement.

But the reader, I realized, must adapt quickly to circumstances. The second patient was undergoing a nonoral treatment and could communicate only by occasionally nodding her head. Barbara knew she was religious and sang softly along to her three Anglican hymns: The Lord Is My Shepherd, How Great Thou Art, and Morning Has Broken. It was deeply moving to watch the patient respond to the words and music with the smallest gestures and wide-eyed wonder. Barbara told me that she herself was not particularly religious but understood the power of hymns and when I commented on her adaptability she said, “That’s what we actors do all the time.” As if to confirm this, her third encounter was with a middle-aged man for whom she performed one of Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes with great vivacity, because she knew the patient was a fan of the TV series Tales of the Unexpected.

Barbara later told me that sometimes you encounter resistance from patients. She once visited a ward where the patient was telling everyone, including herself, to “fuck off”: it was only when she discovered the patient was Irish and was singing to her, Danny Boy, Molly Malone and Galway Bay, that she managed to get her attention before being gratefully told to f*ck off. Both Barbara and Emma acknowledge that there is a disproportionate number of women among the actors involved. They also realise that the experience is a two-way street, benefiting both the actor and the patient. “It gives me more confidence,” says Barbara, and “it’s as good as playing to a full house,” says Emma.

After an afternoon, I was left in awe of the skill and dedication of these actor-readers and the tangible good they do. Lucy Briers, InterAct Ambassador, puts it eloquently when she tells me that reading to a patient is “like shining a torch into the human brain.”