Theatre reviews: Black Hole Sign | The Lightning Thief

Black Hole Sign, Tron Theatre, Glasgow ★★★★

The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★

Something is dying in Uma Nada-Rajah’s powerful new play Black Hole Sign; and it’s not only the reasonably fit-looking man in Bed 4, who has just been diagnosed with a catastrophic brain bleed that will almost certainly end his life before morning.

Set in a stressed-out NHS accident and emergency department where a large hole has just appeared in the ceiling, Nada-Rajah’s play seems in many ways like an elegy for an NHS ideal of universal care that is slowly bleeding to death after years of underfunding and creeping privatisation; and in a single 90-minute movement, her central narrative charts the end of a nursing career built around the fulfilment of that post-war promise.

Yet Nada-Rajah – who is herself a critical care staff nurse in the NHS – cannot help also observing, and recording, the sheer vitality and intensity of human experience that still persists in the NHS, and the remarkable enduring strength of an idea that millions still cherish.

READ MORE: Theatre reviews: The Needle Room | Salt

And between these two impulses, her play achieves a rare and subtle balance between tragedy and comedy, despair and faith, that tastes like reality itself.

In Gareth Nicholls’s beautifully-paced production – played out on a fine open set by Anna Orton, lit by Lizzie Powell – each of these roles is played to perfection, with Helen Logan perhaps giving the performance of her life as dedicated but exhausted charge nurse Crea, alongside Dani Heron as her brilliant staff nurse Ani, Betty Valencia in darkly comic form as useless student Lina, and a superb Ann Louise Ross as Tersia, an old lady delirious with infection, but not too daft to see all the tensions and pressures with which the staff are dealing.

Around these women stand Crea’s admirer, Billy the porter, played with feeling by Martin Docherty, Beruce Khan as the man in Bed 4, and a crucial seventh character called Isla. And even after the tragic crisis of the plot, Nada-Rajah allows a final gleam of hope; a quiet passing on of the mighty torch of unconditional care, just when it seemed about to flicker into darkness.

If Uma Nada-Rajah’s accident and emergency ward contains elements of both heaven and hell, there’s no let-up at all in the infernal journey of the young hero of The Lightning Thief, a musical based on the first of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson novels for young people, published in 2005.

Percy is a rebellious young teenage boy living in working-class New York, when it is suddenly revealed to him that he is a demi-god, whose absentee father is the great sea-god Poseidon; and in no time, he is swept up into a world of other demi-gods and of the gods themselves, as he is sent on a quest to the underworld that may prevent a terrible Olympian war.

In this stage version of the novel, the story of Percy and his quest, alongside his two demigod friends Annabeth and Grover, is told in classic 21st century musical style, full of anthems to individual destiny and determination so predictable in their chords and cadences that they could have been written by a well-trained bot, although in fact they were penned by Rob Rokocki.

If the music is unremarkable, though, director-choreographer Lizzi Gee’s 14-strong company busk their way through this wildly improbable story with impressive enthusiasm and wit; while a big, excited audience of 10-15-year-olds make it clear that they just can’t get enough of this show and its cast, not least Vasco Emauz’s charismatic Percy, and Cahir O’Neill as Grover, the old pal who is suddenly outed as a Centaur, in a scene that is both mind-bogglingly strange, and completely typical of this daft but vivid show.

Black Hole Sign is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, until 4 October, and at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 8-18 October. Lightning Thief is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, until 27 September.

The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today