I enjoyed watching this play, set in an NHS operating theatre but I did not feel it had a lasting impact on me. The heroine, Vashti, a urologist played by Indira Varma, stands somewhat apart from her colleagues. She is somewhat OCD, reluctant to delegate. A key message of the play is that it is impossible to get emotionally involved in this environment. Patients, of necessity, are seen as lumps of meat and operating on them near an artery is going into tiger country. None of this is terribly shocking and so my lasting feeling is that the play was entertaining but not thought-provoking. The entertainment comes from watching the relationships among the characters play out in what The Guardian describes as a "classy soap". There is the junior doctor Emily whose boyfriend is also at the hospital; the senior doctor with a health issue; the somewhat foot-dragging nurses.
Emily's journey from being over-caring, trying overlong to resuscitate a dead patient for example, is one of the key evolutions in the play. She has as a foil her boyfriend who is much more resolved to the need for a matter of fact approach. On the other hand, Vashti makes the opposite journey, when her Aunt is admitted to the hospital and is the victim of mistreatment.
It is a fast-paced production with speedy scene changes, mimicking the sense of pace in the hospital itself. Satisfying at the time but easy to forget the detail.
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