This Is Going to Hurt, Apollo Theatre, review: a stirring pro-NHS, anti-Government blast

Be still, my beating heart. For the first time since March 16, Shaftesbury Avenue is alive with the sound of audience merriment. Nica Burns, co-owner of Nimax theatres, is swiftly opening up her six West End playhouses one by one, within social distancing guidelines – her bold, essentially non-profit-making contribution to setting theatreland on the road to recovery.

Many hard yards lie ahead before the industry is hale and hearty but as a DIY job retention scheme and a bid to keep the flame alive, Burns’s nights ahead already deserve applause. And it’s entirely appropriate that the landmark first performance-run since lockdown should be conducted by Adam Kay. Kay not only enjoyed a stint with this show (derived from his best-selling 2017 book of the same name) at the Garrick at the start of the year, but is a former NHS doctor – and one who, inevitably, has a fair bit to get off his chest.

Not that, after we’ve filed in (following the now obligatory – and here oh-so-apt – temperature check), we’re in for a lecture on opening night, albeit it’s a gala evening predominantly given over to NHS workers. Kay had taken to Twitter earlier that day  – amid the free school meals furore – to deliver a damning one-liner (“If the NHS were suggested as a concept today, it would be voted down by a huge government majority”). But he appended his thoughts on the handling of the health service and coronavirus crisis to his closing, impassioned explanation as to why he quit as an obstetrician in 2010, following a grimly upsetting delivery. 

“The virus hit a system that had no slack,” he said, paying tribute to NHS staff, especially the hundreds who have lost their lives this year. Their warnings about the lack of PPE went unheeded, he maintained. His take-home prescription: those running the system should know what it’s like on the frontline, get their hands dirty.

The bulk of his spiel, though – presented amid giant pill-bottles, with the witty, brisk 40-year-old arriving in visor, face-mask and protective gown – is about getting our laughter muscles working again. Leafing the book (swigging refreshment from mock sample jars) he imparts diary entries galore, most of them delivered with gossipy levity. There are official reprimands – for referring to the undergraduate learning centre as the “early learning centre” – and intimate revelations: “For the third time in a week my boxers have been soaked in somebody else’s blood…”

A dab hand at a keyboard, he peddles fun parody songs too: The Beatles’s “O Bloody Bladder”, Phil Collins’s “Take a Look at Me Nana” and so on. It was either alarming or amusing that our supposedly informed audience was more stumped than not by the running musical gag which required it to deduce the correct ailment to sing in place of the chorus refrain to Leonard Cohen’s classic Hallelujah (no one, for instance, got Yellow Fever).

 He gave the crowd (about half the pre-Covid capacity of 650) the benefit of the doubt – “You’re tired”. A show you could say was, quite literally, just what the doctors ordered.

Until November 8. Tickets: 0330 333 4809; nimaxtheatres.com