29/07/2022
This play was inspired by tragedy.
In early 2015 there were a spate of suicides by junior doctors in Victorian hospitals – four within a month. Whilst such events are distressingly common within the profession, four deaths in such quick succession rocked the health sector. Something was clearly wrong with the workplace culture of hospitals, and something had to change.
At the University of Sydney, a group of medical and nursing academics began an open and frank conversation – as people directly responsible for the training of health professionals, what might they do to try and shift these toxic cultures? For many of them, these issues were deeply personal – they had all worked in clinical environments themselves, and the pressures were viscerally familiar. As one of them, Dr Kimberly Ivory, observed in an article:
“In the nearly forty years since I started medical school, I have known of a number of suicides of colleagues and friends. And it has not just been suicides. There’s the exhausted resident who drove off the road to her death after 56 hours on-call. Then there’s the one who did the same, but survived. The actual suicides are simply the tip of an iceberg buoyed by the many that tried and failed, thought about it and changed their minds, numbed their pain with drugs and alcohol, or walked away from the profession completely in order to keep body and soul together.”
They began to share stories with theatre academic Paul Dwyer, himself the youngest son of an orthopaedic surgeon. Dismayed by the stories being shared with him, Paul approached David Williams to create a piece of verbatim theatre that might offer a space to shed light on these issues. The result of this is Grace Under Pressure, co-commissioned by Seymour Centre and The Big Anxiety Festival, which premiered in Sydney in October 2017.
Over a six month period, Paul and David interviewed around 30 health professionals - doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators. They asked them to share the passions that drew them to medicine and nursing, about their journey through training and professional practice, about moments when they felt right at the edge of their competence and capacity, and about moments of joy and satisfaction, moments when they thought, “I’ve done good today”.
The responses were rich and generous. Ranging from wildly funny to utterly heartbreaking, the stories within Grace Under Pressure will leave no audience member unaffected. Vividly brought to life by a cast of four extraordinary actors, the play takes the audience on an unforgettable journey. There will be laughter, there will be shock, and there will be tears.
Book here for this Saturday night’s show at the Town Hall: http://www.horshamtownhall.com.au/hthevent/grace-under-pressure/
