Based on over 70 interviews with nurses of all ages, backgrounds and nationalities, Tending at the Riverside Studios tenderly and powerfully gives true voice to the 40,000 nurses in the NHS.
Written by El Blackwood and directed by John Livesey, this piece of theatre is essential viewing for anyone who feels they should bear witness to the incredible sacrifices the caring profession make daily (and even more so during the covid crisis).
Blackwood has constructed the script from verbatim interviews with NHS nurses over a two-year period and this veracity shines through. The seventy interviewed individuals are distilled into three composite characters: paediatric ICU nurse (Blackwood), palliative care nurse (Anjelica Serra) and A&E nurse (Ben Lynn).
In an interview with the Nursing Times, Blackwood explained she felt that nurses weren’t talked about in a way that was humanising enough and that “ during Covid-19… you had the pots and the pans and stuff and then we kind of all just moved on… I just thought that how we discussed the nursing experience during Covid-19 wasn’t quite accurate”.
Tended works to rebalance the public’s understanding of the nursing professions and its struggles but also motivations and joys. It also reminds of us the sheer harrowing toll the covid crisis played on those in the front line.
The terror of the unknown we all felt has already begun to get lost in time and it is important to remember that, in the early days of covid at least, those of us who worked as key workers were facing true uncertainty and fear.
As a key worker in a different field (education), who was working on site every school day of the pandemic, I felt my own experience reflected on stage in a way I had not seen before. So often, looking back at the pandemic is all light-hearted jokes about banana bread, decluttering and sourdough starters. I have never before seen portrayed how those of us not locked down handled the overwhelming responsibility of trying not to catch, or bring home, a deadly disease.
Tended is a powerful piece of theatre and will become a historic piece of testimony when people look back at this era.
Red Bus Londinium Life 
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