Don’t bother going to see this play unless you’re happy to have your views challenged and your mind changed. Pipeline is a small theatre company, but this play packs a hell of a punch.

David Jeffs, played by Titus Adam, appears on stage to start the show at a podium, with only a spotlight. He starts to speak, telling the audience that we’re not attending a play, but rather a lecture given by him. He makes fun of the idea of a play about the NHS, draws the audience in with a few laughs, and then wrong-foots us as his rhetoric starts to become more right-wing, more racially charged. He wants to tell us the story of Karl Brandt, the “misunderstood” Nazi doctor.

As he gets into the swing of his story, however, he is taken unwell, and finds himself in the busy oncology wing of his local NHS hospital. The play cleverly uses voice-over to demonstrate his state of mental confusion, and this, on top of the frenetic action of the other players, serves to make the small cast of five seem like a much larger group. As his physical pain increases, and he begins to take the morphine prescribed for his palliative care, his views on race and cultural separation are aired ever more aggressively, his deeply-held views not masked anymore, but coming to the surface.

The cast is superb, particularly Shereener Browne, who plays several characters, including Laverne, an over-worked nurse on the ward, and Dr Darla Adebayo, a new consultant and melanoma specialist. Adebayo is ideally suited to treat Jeffs for his terminal cancer, but he cannot see her as anything beyond her hijab. His vicious attacks of her are uncomfortable to watch and ring true – it’s clear that the writer, Jon Welch, spent time developing this play while listening to people’s experiences of racism.

This is a story about the resilience of NHS staff, how many of them have to deal with racism (not only from patients, but in microaggressions from colleagues), but also about how they find moments of joy and friendship. It’s a story of isolation and alienation; of children and their parents, and what happens when we can’t reconcile ourselves with the views of our families. The subject matter is heavy and challenging, and yet the folks at Pipeline have brought us a really enjoyable piece of theatre that’s likely to stay with the audience for a long time.

I also think it’s worth celebrating Arts at the Old Fire Station for continuing to give a stage to small, theatre companies like Pipeline, allowing them to bring daring, interesting, and diverse theatre to Oxford.   ★★★★☆    @BookingAround   6^th April 2019