Review | The Promise at Minerva Theatre, Chichester: 'Timely story of the birth of the NHS, but ideas aren't fully fleshed out'

From left: Miles Richardson, Clare Burt, Clive Wood and Andrew Woodall in The Promise. Photo by Helen Murray

The universe works in mysterious ways sometimes.

On the day I went to see a play seemingly about the birth of the NHS by a freshly-elected Labour government, junior doctors were offered a 22 per cent pay deal to end the ongoing strikes by… well, a freshly-elected Labour government.

And of course I went to see it with – you guessed it – a junior doctor.

So while I don’t subscribe to the belief that all theatre has to have something to say about the times we live in (I’m happy with unadulterated entertainment), it felt like cosmic forces had set up the play to deliver on this front.

But from the off, The Promise did not turn out to be all it promised to be.

You would think the central character of this play, penned by Casualty co-creator Paul Unwin, would be Aneurin Bevan: the radical Minister of Health who spearheaded the NHS and made the titular oath.

But it instead focused on the final years of his cabinet colleague ‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson, from her speech at the Blackpool Labour Party conference in 1945 to her death from a drug overdose two years later.

Played with fiery passion and bruising wit by Clare Burt, it is an impressive performance – particularly how she so convincingly embodies the MP’s crippling asthma, gasping for breath as she speaks: a fitting metaphor, perhaps, for her struggle to be heard in a political arena dominated by men.

But all the shouting does become a little one-note, amplified in the Cabinet scenes where they’re all at each other’s throats for 10 minutes.

The expected dénouement – Ellen seeing the NHS bill pass before her untimely death – did not come to pass either.

The play seems to drop this narrative strand altogether and takes a surreal turn for the finale, as a ghostly Churchill delivers a speech about the grubbiness of mankind while Burt nobly tries to avoid choking on a flurry of fake snow during Ellen’s death throes.

There were also a couple of technical snags.

The play had to be stopped midway through the first act, and an overzealous burst of smoke to simulate a steam train left the audience wheezing almost as much as Red Ellen herself.

The crux of the matter is that the play did not seem to know what it wanted to be; was it a Wilkinson biopic, or a political drama about the passing of the NHS bill?

Neither were fully fleshed out.

So while The Promise is certainly timely, and largely entertaining, it needed more than divine intervention to get its message across.

Until Saturday, August 17.