The Human Body review – Keeley Hawes and the NHS in a silver screen romance

aAs the debate over the future of the National Health Service grows in urgency week by week (despite the current trainee doctors’ strike), the theater is doing its job to remind us of all we have to lose if we go back to the beginning .

Michael Sheen has just taken on the role of Aneurin Bevan in Nye at the National Theatre, while Lucy Kirkwood places Bevan’s 1948 vision of healthcare ‘available free to all’ as the backdrop to this love story.

The drama centers on Iris Elcock (Keeley Hawes), a Shropshire GP and Labor Party councillor, a proto-new woman juggling the balance between home and work. Her sedate marriage to a wounded ex-naval officer, Julian (Tom Goodman-Hill), shows cracks after a chance meeting with George Blythe (Jack Davenport), a local man who spent the war in Hollywood. He has returned, apolitical and apathetic, it seems, until he meets Iris.

Hawes and Davenport have a potentially explosive chemistry from the moment they meet in a train car, while Kirkwood’s script crackles with unspoken longings, disappointments, longing and fantastic humor. Having recently adapted Roald Dahl’s The Witches, Kirkwood shows her range here, often deftly weaving larger politics with the politics of Iris’ marriage and affair.

The production is ostensibly a paean to British filmmaking of the period, with references to Brief Encounter and a costume palette bleached in color to resemble a film in motion. Fly Davis’ monochromatic set features a sometimes dizzying rotation and a screen that captures Iris and George’s black-and-white romance up close. A roving camera also appears, along with an imposing spotlight.

There is a similar use of film and screen techniques as in Jamie Lloyd’s recent Sunset Boulevard and The Picture of Dorian Gray, currently starring Sarah Snook. The effect here, under the direction of Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee, takes away from the intensity and seriousness of the central love story rather than adding to it.

Conceptually, the screen work is inspired, capturing the couple and their intimacies in a magnified manner. Sometimes it pays off: when George tentatively reveals his feelings to Iris, we see on screen his fingers brush against hers, and hers back.

But more often it has the opposite effect: sometimes it distracts us from Hawes and Davenport’s tense, physical performances, and sometimes it gives their romance a generic celluloid sentimentality. Schmaltzy film music accompanies moments of heightened passion, ironically removing us from the moment.

Hawes and Davenport are still phenomenal to watch, capturing the puzzled stubbornness of midlife enthusiasts, while others in the cast (including Siobhán Redmond, Pearl Mackie and Flora Jacoby Richardson, who plays Iris’ daughter on opening night) spin around as actors and play multiple roles. characters.

The marital drama becomes increasingly intense and the play works best when the camera remains offstage. Kirkwood’s script crystallizes the struggles of post-war women, newly independent, who are forced back into their old domestic roles.

The play perhaps has too many moving parts – thematically, in the plot twists and in the literal movement on stage. The story of the NHS sometimes battles for privilege with romance, but ultimately emerges with a powerful message. When Julian tries to dismiss Bevan’s idea as “doomed to failure,” Iris corrects him: “The idea won’t have failed,” she says. “We the idea must have failed.” Rather.