A stage play about nursing, based on real-life stories from more than 70 nurses, has debuted in theatres across the South of England.
El Blackwood, writer and one of three stars of new stage play Tending, created the show after being inspired by her best friend, who is a paediatric nurse.
“Nursing and nurses weren’t spoken about in a way, in public discourse, that was nuanced enough and that was humanising enough”
El Blackwood
The play focuses on monologues from three nurses: one from palliative care, one from paediatric intensive care and one from A&E.
These nurses are composites – fictional characters based off a collection of real people – and the stories they tell the audience are quotes from interviews Ms Blackwood conducted with more than 70 nurses over the last two years.
Ms Blackwood, who wished to emphasise that she, herself, is not a nurse, told Nursing Times about how the idea to make a play in this style, known as verbatim theatre, came about.
She said: “I felt like nursing and nurses weren’t spoken about in a way, in public discourse, that was nuanced enough and that was humanising enough.
“I think a lot of people felt that during Covid-19… you had the pots and the pans and stuff and then we kind of all just moved on… I just thought that how we discussed the nursing experience during Covid-19 wasn’t quite accurate.
“And then also the fact that it felt that we just left them behind afterwards was wrong.”
She said this, alongside discussions with her paediatric nurse friend, led her to asking around for people to interview.
From there, she collected stories from a range of primarily hospital-based nurses, an experience she described as humbling for her and “cathartic” for the interviewees.
Ms Blackwood said each interview was “striking” for different reasons, but that stories of small acts of care were some of the ones that stuck out most in her mind.
She recalled the testimony of one nurse who had helped relieve the discomfort of a young cancer patient.
“There was a patient in his late-20s who had terminal cancer… he had all of these mouth sores, because oncology drugs can give you really bad lesions,” said Ms Blackwood.
“She spoke about how she just took this pink sponge on a white stick and just pressed it into water and pressed it to his lips to stop them from drying out, which no one had been able to take the time to do before, and how relieved he was, and what that was like for her to do that.”
El Blackwood in costume for Tending
This, and other similar stories, made it into the play, and Ms Blackwood said she hoped these moments could give viewers a better understanding of the day-to-day realities of nursing.
She said she chose the three specialties featured in the play – palliative, paediatric and A&E – to give a broad picture of the profession.
In particular, she noted that the process of interviewing end-of-life care nurses changed her perspective on this part of healthcare.
“I really, really wanted to highlight the work there, because before I started the project, to be totally honest, I had quite a different view of palliative care,” said Ms Blackwood.
“Like a lot of people in this country – we’re quite bad with death as a culture in comparison to other cultures – I couldn’t understand why someone would want to work in palliative care.
“I was just stunned by how beautiful and how much of an honour that they saw it as, the ability to… make that time as good as they possibly can,” she said.
Tending, Ms Blackwood said, is a “call to action to understand nurses better”, and to highlight the brutal pressures nursing staff are under.
“There’s a cruel irony that we hire people as a society to not just be clinically excellent… but also to care. And then we put them in a system which completely burns them out and exhausts them,” she said.
“And that exhaustion often takes away their ability to care.”
Ms Blackwood added: “I feel incredibly passionately about that, especially after interviewing so many nurses. I think it’s just wrong, the current state of play.
“I think they should be paid a lot more, I think they should be getting special treatment, I think they should be getting free manicures to be totally honest. We really, really, really need to support them more.”
Tending stars Ms Blackwood, Anjelica Serra and Ben Lynn, and debuted at Edinburgh Fringe last year.
It began its run in Bath in April. Since then, the play has had further dates in Bath, London and will open in Oxford later this week.
