Joycean hospital drama invites debate about A&E
HEAD CASE
Bewley’s Cafe Theatre
If Garrett Keogh has never spent time as an intending patient in an overcrowded hospital accident and emergency department, then he has second sight. Head Case is, first of all, a play. It is imaginative, observational, funny, angry and touching. Above all, there’s no sign of his navel anywhere in text or performance. The play, and Keogh as actor as well as author, is looking outwards: at his audience and at the wider world. This may be an angry play, but it’s not a self-pitying whinge of personal anecdote.
The premise is a moithered and bothered man in A&E after receiving a bang on the head. We’re even told how it all started: when he bunged a bit of chopped carrot across the kitchen that caught his wife full in the face. Laughing together, they proceeded to sling other objects, getting larger and harder, until a hefty skillet got him on the side of the head. Hence A&E. (There’s mention of a knife in passing, but nothing very determined.)
But now, after hours and hours of to-ing and fro-ing between departments, delivered via a wheelchair driven by a vocal workers’ rights activist who’s ironically the living spit of the late James Connolly, he’s been shovelled back to A&E reception, only to find his precarious seat at the end of a bench has been occupied by another unfortunate. So he’s about to lose his rag: it’s been a long day.
The piece is beautifully constructed, with the man’s mental meanderings delivered in blank verse, a kind of Joycean musing, with slightly haunting lighting changes from Conleth White. They’re the voice in his head, of course: what he wants to say, though admits he didn’t say any of it out loud.
The play is a polemic, a deserved theatrical indictment of the state of the Irish health service, but Keogh is unfair in one tiny aspect, giving his character a cynical reflection that if you have the “moolah”, there would be five-star treatment, without waiting. (In A&E, it’s a level-playing field. For instance, a 15-hour wait, nine of these on a bench and chair, only to be sent home and told to return for repair surgery after three days, is the same for private or public patients... if you’ll forgive the personal reminiscence from a critic.)
But we are also entertained with observant accounts of fellow patients that range between hilarious, pathetic, and frankly unsettling.
Top of that latter is the description of the woman in a classy pair of boots who catches his eye (and his nose) due to the state of the shoes, on which she has deposited the contents of her stomach. In addition, when she more or less comes to and bends forward to examine the “damage”, other liquid cascades between her legs.
Her lamentations, expressed loudly and graphically, are for the state of her boots.
Then there’s the hearty chap who howls in pained outrage each time a doctor tries to examine his apparently injured leg. Much later in the day, appeased, he becomes the dreaded “party man”, howling with laughter and taking under his doubtfully caring wing a languid young man clutching his sports bag, although stoned out of his mind.
They bond over an odoriferous chipper feast, the wafting scent of vinegar having an unfortunate effect on our narrator, despite his hunger.
The punchline comes when he finally brings himself to strike up a conversation, with a woman who has a large white soggy lump decorating her nose. It turns out it’s a poultice, a homely remedy she has been using for days in an attempt to cure an infection. It’s failed, the infection becoming steadily worse.
To her, Keogh allocates his peroration: the woman complains quietly and sadly that there was a time when you would be seen quickly and efficiently in hospital in an emergency. Now, she says, after a lifetime of working hard and paying her taxes, she’s bereft and abandoned in the country to which she has given love and loyalty. And she feels, quietly and despairingly, that’s not fair.
There’s live piano by Hélène Montague, the music cocomposed with Trevor Knight, and the effective design is by Marie Tierney.
Head Case is at Bewley’s Cafe Theatre until September 7, following its premiere at the Gap Arts Festival in 2023. The festival in north Wicklow, founded by Keogh, was established to bring professional arts to an area of the country unserved since the 1950s. In 2019 the event was nominated for a European Rural Inspiration Award.