Open Heart Surgery

Theatre Uncut is a full day of short plays of both up-and-coming and established playwrights responses to the cuts being imposed by the new coalition government, of which the arts are hit particularly hard by. Stretching right across the country from Edinburgh to Exeter, the event invites discussion with the hope of provoking protests, with students at its core.

First up is short play Open Heart Surgery written by Laura Lomas. In an emotional monologue, a young woman is keeping vigil at her partner’s bedside as he struggles to recover from open heart surgery. The symbolism is pretty clear – the surgery represents the financial cuts, the patient as public services and the helpless onlooker as society. Sadly, the actual content of the play doesn’t go much deeper than these three basic representations, and does little to demonstrate the brutality of many cuts. Take, for example, the very essence of open heart surgery. The only reason anyone would undergo such a procedure would be if something was desperately, life-threateningly wrong, and it would of course be done out of purely good intentions. The coalition’s cuts, in contrast, are arguably over-zealous and misdirected, targeting the weakest in society rather than the strongest. Perhaps a monologue about a victim of an unprovoked violent attack might therefore be more appropriate.

If the content is in any way lacking, one would assume that, for the purposes of the event, the rest of the production would be an example of extraordinary theatre; of the talent and ideas that we stand to lose as a result of the cuts; an opportunity to gauge how much writers, directors, actors and producers depend on the current government funding.

Unfortunately, Open Heart Surgery fails to reveal anything exemplary and is distinctly average, from the acting to the staging. Everything about it rings of amateur student productions – which of course it is, but the result is that it fails to demonstrate why such a piece ought to receive government funding. Rather than igniting an urgency to protest and to question, the regrettable conclusion upon leaving Open Heart Surgery is that some projects are worthy of funding and some projects simply aren’t – an extremely disappointing result from an otherwise excellent cause that had promised a rare opportunity to illustrate the full extent of the coalition’s brutal cuts.