Adam Kay, Apollo Theatre review - former medic tells tales from NHS front line | reviews, news & interviews
Adam Kay, Apollo Theatre review - former medic tells tales from NHS front line
Adam Kay, Apollo Theatre review - former medic tells tales from NHS front line
Gala show to reopen West End theatre
What a pleasure it was to step inside a West End theatre again, and what a different experience it was – temperature checks at the door, a one-way system through to the seats and an app to order drinks.
Actually the Apollo last night was one of the safest places in all of London anyway, as Nimax (to which all those who love live performance will be enormously grateful) began the phased reopening of its theatres with Adam Kay's This Is Going to Hurt; the former doctor opened his run with a free gala performance for NHS workers.
Kay kept a diary throughout his career, and the show is structured around his waspish observations about his colleagues and his patients (particularly those who managed to lose objects in their vaginas or rectums), with wonderfully clever and tightly scripted musical interludes, in which he sets gags to pop songs where the payoff is often a dreadful pun on the song title.
So – my favourite last night – a song about a heavy smoker who only indulges on Saturdays, sung to the tune of “Easy on a Sunday Morning”, became “Wheezy on a Sunday morning”. There is a delicious pleasure in anticipating the punchline.
This Is Going to Hurt started life at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016 (as Fingering a Minor at the Piano) and Kay then turned it into a bestselling book, followed by another show and book, Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas. If you've seen This Is Going to Hurt before you will recognise much here, but all of Kay's tales bear repeating, and there were some freshly minted gags too.
A few were just for the doctors in the audience – about orthopaedic surgeons being a bit dense – and there was a subtle dig at Donald Trump. Kay also recounted reading a diary entry on a morning television show that was wonderfully unsuitable for family audiences, and coronavirus made an appearance, but it was brief. The audience, both last night's and those to come, have probably had just about enough of it by now.
Kay's party piece for regular attendees at his shows is his call-and-response set to Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah”, where they have to guess the four-syllable chorus response from the previous verse, and then sing. There was an epic fail when the medics didn't recognise the symptoms of yellow fever; maybe the theatre wasn't the safest place to be, after all.
Kay ended with a passionate statement about the NHS and how the 1.5 million people working in it go above and beyond to keep it working in normal times, let alone when they face a deadly virus that has already taken more than 600 lives of frontline workers. Don't clap me, he said, clap everyone in the NHS. And we do.
rating
Explore topics
Share this article
The future of Arts Journalism
You can stop theartsdesk.com closing!
We urgently need financing to survive. Our fundraising drive has thus far raised £33,000 but we need to reach £100,000 or we will be forced to close. Please contribute here: https://gofund.me/c3f6033d
And if you can forward this information to anyone who might assist, we’d be grateful.
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take a subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
Add comment