The Human Body by Lucy Kirkwood. The Donmar Warehouse, 41 Earlham Street, London WC2H to 13 April 2024.

3✩✩✩ Review: William Russell.

“Keely Hawes magnificent in an overlong, overstuffed play set during the creation of the National Health Service.”

Currently it is fashionable to celebrate the birth of the National Health servive – Nye about Aneurin Bevan is due next at the National Theatre – Lucky Kirkwood has chosen to do so by taking Brief Encounter by the scruff of the next, make the Celia Johnson character, Iris Elcock, a doctor with a doctor husband, who is afflicted by his war wounds, while she manages to find time to be a GP, a local authority councillor, advisor to a Barbara Castle type MP, wife and mother of the obligatory cute child, and still find time for an affair and to seek to chosen as the Labour candidate in a forthcoming by-election. Set in 1948 Keeley Hawes plays this amazing woman brilliantly and creates a superb Celia Johnson image which directors Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee have enhanced by all the surrently fashionable means – there are cameras everywhere with what they are filming shown on a large screen at the back of the stage supposed in the style of post war British films – and the stage crew wander on and off shifting furniture, standing in when something does not exist – character takes coat off to hang on non existent coat stand so stage hand stands in – and everything is coloured a rather depressing shade of blue. To add to the mix the lover she has the affair with is George Blythe played by Jack Davenport, an actor, a cheap Brit home from Hollywood for reasons that turn out to have to do with the NHS, whom she meets on a train. Both he and Hawes are very good indeed, although the chemistry between them on film is not all that great but shooting ad hoc with cameras is never going to produce what you see on a cinema screen. The result is an overstuffed pudding of a play. It also looks at the way marriages after the war faced crises because while one was away the other was discovering fresh fields and husband and wife are now different people although it is arguable that Elcock was always horrid. As all the other characters are played by just three actors things do get a mite confusing .The hapless Siobhan Redmond, who gets landed with some of the worst wigs on the West End stage, plays the feisty Barbara Castle type MP, Dr Iris’s mentor, as well as four other characters, all of them rather well, while Tim Goodman-Hill, who plays Iris’s war wounded husband, a man opposed to doctor’s becoming employees of the state, becomes so many people, while not looking very much different every time he appears, it gets hard to know who he is at any one time. At least Pearl Mackie gets to play, among others, Blythe’s Hollywood wife who eventually is unveiled when Iris pays a call uninvited on his mother and she proves certainly not like any of the other parts Mackie gets to play. Both, like Redmond, display great versatility but it all seems a cost cutting exercise – once upon a time a play demanding a couple of dozen characters got cast with a couple of dozen actors, something which only happens now at the National. The result is a challenging evening full of good things about the state of post war Britain but eventually one does tire of the revolve going round yet again and back projections suddenly appearing. Just where the clothing coupons came from for the new look dress which plays such an important part in Iris’s, as does the Princess Elizabeth’s wedding dress, is never explained. The evening belongs to Hawes but somewhere en route to the stage all the creatives should have taken a step back and asked whether what they were getting up to was absolutely necessary.

Cast

Keeley Hawes – Iris Elcock.

Jack Davenport – George Blythe.

Ton Goodman- Hill – Julian Elcock and ten others.

Siobhan Redmond – Helen Mackeson and five others.

Pearl Mackie - and ten others.

Flora Jacoby Richardson/ Audrey Kattan – Laura Elcock.

Creatives

Director – Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee.

Designer – Fly Davis.

Lighting Designer – Joshua Pharo.

Sound Designers & Composers – Ben & Max Ringham.

Video Designers – Nathan Amzi & Joe Ransom.

Fight Director – Bret Yount.

Intimacy Director – Sara Green.

Voice Coach – Barbara Houseman.

Dialect Coach –Penny Dyer & Hazel Holder.