Dressed in hospital scrubs, Tania Amsell as Amy sits at the centre of a bare stage, a young NHS junior doctor working in Swansea, telling us her story.
She wants to work at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London and describes the support for her application that she gets from Mike, a consultant who says she needs to be more assertive. “If you need a crash team, shout for it,” he tells her.
Had she been more assertive at a social event, she might not have mixed her drinks and embarrassingly vomited over Trish, a hospital worker she was flirting with.
However, it is while she is the duty doctor over Christmas at the Accident and Emergency department that something happens to unsettle her with memories of a childhood event. She had been dealing with the usual run of ordinary and peculiar cases, including a man in a Santa costume who had part of a chimney stuck inside his body, when she is called to see a small boy with a cut on his leg. How she deals with the boy recalls something that happened to her twin sister Alice when they, as children, were excitably dancing in a sports shop on their trip to London.
Tania Amsell’s short, often mildly amusing monologue is a personal story about just one character. We get to know very little about anyone else, or any particular issue. The NHS is merely the backdrop to a light, gentle, well-delivered performance.