The Language of Kindness
Warwick Arts Centre/Touring

THERE’S an undeniable chemistry in the live theatre experience, even in a space necessarily less than half full and the audience socially distanced, which no online performance can hope to capture.

And it would be difficult to imagine a more currently appropriate play to mark a return to the stage than Sasha Milavic Davies and James Yeatman’s adaptation of Christie Watson’s acclaimed account of her long nursing career.

The Language of Kindness for Wayward Productions recounts the exhausting and exhaustive life of a hospital nurse from rookie days, learning and surviving the realities of the ward world, to senior nurse. With responsibilities for lives and deaths as demanding practically and, more so, emotionally than that of the doctors, she brilliantly overcomes obvious hurdles.

Translating moving autobiographical prose into engaging visual theatre is no mean feat, especially as the action is set in an environment surgically romanticised by TV soaps. The production skilfully establishes its milieu through dance and mime — oddly, no choreographer is credited — before dramatising the hectic pace of the staff’s treadmill routine.

It’s one punctuated by critical moments for fragile patients and the traumatic experience of a child coping with and facing her operation for a brain tumour doesn’t need words to communicate.

Neither does the quiet rhythm of the neonatal ward with the constant nursing commitment to the care of precious charges, nor the moments seized in the middle of a quiet night to share a hasty “banquet” from a trolley.

As the 80-minute production develops, the individual stories emerge — the struggle to revive a cardiac arrest, the emergency ward amputation of an infant’s necrotic leg, awareness of a kindness that can only be called love as an experienced nurse watches a colleague nurse her dying father.

What finally registers from a production faithful to Christie Watson’s story and message is the devotion and the cost to professionals from whom we demand so much and value only when, as individuals, families or as a nation, we need them.

The short tour of Wayward Productions’ superb ensemble cast needs to be seen, above all by our legislators who are happy to clap our nurses but not pay our debt in the only language that speaks to them. But then I remember our leader has seen them at close quarters — has he no sense of indebtedness?

Tours Assembly Hall Theatre, Tunbridge Wells, May 26-29 and Shoreditch Town Hall, London, 3-12 June, details: waywardproductions.co.uk