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Press Reviews

 

Effie’s Burning by Valerie Windsor

Bordon Herald

“Care in the Community”, remember that? When it was decided by those people who knew, that those in long term care were better served in the community. People happy and secure in their institutions, but would surely be happier leading supported but independent lives. People who had, in many cases, years earlier been taken from a community, a society who did not want to know, who chose not to understand, and placed them where they were safe. Places where they were able to form their own communities, their own friendships. Then those clever people who knew best said “No, this is not how we should treat such people. They are people just like us, so they deserve a life just like us. We will close the institutions. We will move these people back into society.” The only trouble was they did not ask society, nor did they ask the people involved. “It must be better for you, your own room, your own choice. It must be better for you.” Was it better for these people? Was it better for society? I think not, in fact I know it was not. How do I know? Because like so many, I have personal experience of why this policy was a disaster.

This one act play beautifully performed by Lin Blakley and Gerri Farrell, and so sensitively directed by Mark Holliday, addresses these questions, and as the play developed, even more. Questions that affected not only Effie, of the title, but Dr Kovacs who herself was having to adjust to the situation in which she now found herself.

Effie, with a mental age of ten, having been repeatedly raped became a child mother. With no support from inadequate parents, she locked herself away, only to be dragged from her childhood home and placed in an asylum. A fate that befell so many in a similar circumstance. A fate that had befallen the late Alice, who, sleeping in the next bed, had become Effie’s best friend and lifelong companion. All this Dr Kovacs found out when Effie was recovering in the burns unit of the hospital. Dr Kovacs herself seeking her own role in life had been a clever girl, and had stumbled into medicine. Subject to the sarcasm and bullying of her senior consultant, she herself was as vulnerable as Effie, robbed of everything familiar. Only through the influence of Effie, who had made her point in the only way she knew, burning her “ideal home” down, did she find a way of asserting herself, as through a developing relationship with Effie she began to realise and understand her own insecurities.

For an audience fed the banality of television hospital drama, where the sex life of the staff determines the ratings, this live performance hit hard. Effie evoked laughter, but on laughing the audience felt immediately uncomfortable, and wondered ‘should we have laughed?’ People fidgeted in their seats more than usual, but as the performance ended, and the actors received their deserved applause, it was not an end, for as the audience arose they left earnestly discussing the issues raised.

Eat your heart out Holby City, this was live theatre, and this is where it is at.