"Blue/Orange" (Young Vic, May 28)

It was a smart decision on the part of the production team to make all of us walk through a replica NHS waiting room on the way in to see this--I felt my usual hospital anxiety flaring up for the first fifteen minutes or so. The script itself, however, concerning a young black patient's potential sectioning for schizophrenia, swiftly removed this feeling, as it became clear that the patient was a remote case: poor, unemployed, without any meaningful connections in the world. This isn't to say that such people might never attend theatres, and certainly not that they don't exist; however, the comfortably middle-class audience that is the mainstay of smart-set London theatres is made to feel closer to the two doctors debating the patient's case. A basic staging decision makes this clear: while the patient sees onstage oranges as blue, we--like the doctors, and (it's implied) as in reality--see them as, well, orange. 

And of course this is part of the point: how hospitals deal with those at society's margins, whose pain and trauma we easily miss. Yet this was one of those well-made scenarios, in which everything is a bit too spring-loaded to produce melodrama. That the senior consultant, in some ways the "bad" of the two doctors, needs the patient to complete his book seems a bit off: can medical case-studies, much less a possible "cure for black psychosis," be based off one patient? Moreover, the script required the younger doctor, out of frustration, to become angry enough to say some career-ending things--it was all a bit "A Few Good Men," past a particular point. 

There's a lot in here that is compelling. Anyone who works in a British institution--maybe in any institution--dreads what happens over the course of the play, as reports recontextualize things said in damning new contexts. I think I've had a version of an early conversation where my lifestyle (place to live, taste in food and wine, social position) are subtly shredded by some cleverboots with thirty years on me. The parts were meaty and actorly, and universally well-performed. And there was much to think about in terms of race and mental illness. But at heart this felt like a real fantasy of institutions: that they produce situations where the "real person" comes out, in anger and anguish and difficulty. But it seemed that a real institution would have prevented anything like such confrontations from taking place; although I can imagine (maybe) a senior doctor lecturing a junior in front of a patient, it seems unlikely that a young doctor would have kept pushing, to the point of destroying their career. This was a scenario that might have played itself out in committee minutes, patient notes, and backroom dealings between colleagues; only the exigencies of the drama (the patient is getting out today! the committee met this mroning!) kept everything locked in one room.

And, of course, from anything I've read recently, cuts and a different health regime mean that this sort of hours-long confrontation over a single patient might now be as much as an anachronism as consultants smoking in an examining room. Add this to the pile of Blair-era dilemmas that now seem like luxuries.