The Times
4 stars out of 5
Ravenscourt review — quietly absorbing portrait of care in the NHS
Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, NW3
★★★★☆
They’ve been having trouble finding the right plays for the main stage upstairs, Richard Eyre’s warring family in The Snail House the latest in a series of high-profile disappointments. Hampstead’s studio space, on the other hand, seems to glide from one success to another. Georgina Burns’s debut full-length drama, about psychotherapists working in an NHS clinic, is a quietly absorbing piece about a system where compassion has to be carefully rationed.
The fact that Burns spent more than a decade working as a therapist gives the writing an aura of authority. Her central character, Lydia, is a young, earnest newcomer to Ravenscourt, where the staff do what they can to help patients in the limited time at their disposal. Burns’s stage directions sum up the utilitarian ambience of Debbie Duru’s intentionally bland set. “A dimly lit office with a couple of desks and chairs, a half-dying plant, a generic cheap painting on the wall and a water dispenser.”
Ascetic and ultra-focused, Lydia has been assigned to deal with Daniel, a 33-year-old depressive who still lives at home, trapped in a corrosive relationship with his mother. Over 90 minutes we eavesdrop on their sessions, watching therapist and patient shuffling towards a kind of intimacy. Lydia, being an idealist, pours herself into the task. Her older colleague Arthur seems to take a more cynical view of their vocation. Lydia is quick to take offence, but when Daniel suffers a meltdown it soon becomes clear that it is Arthur who can draw on a reservoir of experience.
Under Tessa Walker’s unfussy direction it’s a play of small, neatly observed details that proceeds at its own unhurried pace, underpinned by a tight ensemble. As in Ruby Thomas’s family therapy study The Animal Kingdom, staged here this year, we are drawn into the protocols of a world that most of us would probably prefer not to think about. Josef Davies is particularly impressive as Daniel, an unstable combination of inchoate aggression, yearning and self-pity. Lizzy Watts, as Lydia, gives us a prim novice who soon finds herself out of her depth, her every move watched by her unassuming supervisor Denise (Andrea Hall). Jon Foster exudes warmth and informality as Arthur. The battle-hardened psychotherapist who was my guest for the evening was full of admiration afterwards. Non-combatants will be too.
Broadway world
4 stars out of 5
Review: RAVENSCOURT, Hampstead Theatre
A striking debut from ex-psychotherapist Georgina Burns, rich with emotional intelligence, clinical precision, and formidable performances.
Mental health services in the U.K. are chronically under-funded. In 2021, 13% of local spend was allocated to them, but the convoluted and astonishingly long process to actively get help means that those who need it often don’t even attempt to receive the correct treatment. Research shows that north of four million Londoners struggle with their mental health. It’s in this universe – our universe – that Georgina Burns sets Ravenscourt.
A psychotherapist by trade, her ascent to playwriting started with an unsolicited script sent to Hampstead. While it remained unproduced, the literary manager who suggested Burns to apply for the Theatre’s INSPIRE scheme led by Roy Williams. Thus, Ravenscourt was born out of a deep understanding of the subject and a natural penchant for storytelling.
Burns’ text is populated by PTSD, postnatal depression, anxiety, and irresistible black humour. Lydia has just moved from private practice to the NHS and has been assigned to the Ravenscourt centre, Denise and Arthur’s sinking ship. Burns focuses on Lydia’s first case: Daniel is a 33-year-old whose family life is as complicated as his mind is.
He is what they describe as a “revolving door patient”, someone who’s been in and out of their assistance for years. Arthur and Denise have lost all faith that he will one day come out of it, Lydia believes she can help him. But Daniel’s thoughts are more destabilising than he lets on.
Debbie Duru designs a set that looks like a cross-sectioned slice of a building. The talking therapy room owns the space, with its two uncomfortable chairs, drab polyester curtains, stock canvas on the wall, and metal tissue holder. Two corridors book-end it, the staff’s offices and where all their exchanges happen. Director Tessa Walker assembles an outrageously talented cast.
Lizzy Watts’ Lydia is an appeasing, clever young woman who’s slightly patronising at the start. Mostly cool and collected, armed with her emotional support water bottle, she gets on the defensive easily when questioned about her mother. Andrea Hall and Jon Foster are the elder members of the team. She meets his comically lighthearted but always profound ways with clockwork timing as they discuss their patients’ mental health issues as a matter of fact.
This is the strength of the script. Burns’ intent isn’t to shock, it’s to explain. Arthur and Denise’s banter protects them from the personal effects of the horrific context they’re in. They don’t joke about their nameless patients as a way of disrespecting or vilifying them, their sense of humour simply counteracts the darkness and lightens the play. This duplicity is exquisitely evident with Foster and his own exchanges with Josef Davies‘ Daniel, whom he shares a particularly jarring, honest scene with midway through.
Davies’ formidable performance as a severely depressed man who’s been let down by the system over and over again is at the core of the production. He plays Daniel as brilliantly short-tempered, intense and frazzled below the surface of his disillusionment and feelings of dehumanisation. He is a time-bomb that goes off with glaring vulnerability.
Walker’s direction is attentive to the details, using subtly expressive body language to establish relationships and cementing the characters’ role in each other’s space. Scene changes are built on a smooth and unobtrusive choreography that maintains the visual cohesion of the show, making Rebecca Wield (who joins the project as a placement from Central School of Speech and Drama MA program) one to watch.
Narratively, the story isn’t anything revolutionary, but Burns’ approach is rich with emotional intelligence and clinical precision. She takes on a crumbling, unfeeling practice ruled by waiting lists and scorecards, exploring how destructive the lack of support (financial, yes, but also psychological) can be for those for whom support is a profession. It’s a striking, timely debut.
London theatre1
Ravenscourt by Georgina Burns at Hampstead Theatre
OCTOBER 4, 2022 LAST UPDATED: OCTOBER 4, 2022 12:05 PM BY MARY BEER
Debuting her first full-length play, Georgina Burns’ Ravenscroft shows her tremendous promise as a writer. Hampstead’s Associate Director Tessa Walker brings great skill to the production – keeping its pace tight and overseeing exemplary production values that you wouldn’t necessarily expect in a studio space staging of a writer who has only recently graduated from the theatre’s emerging writers programme, INSPIRE (which is led by big-hitting playwright Roy Williams, whose latest work, The Fellowship, recently appeared on the Hampstead’s main stage to mixed reviews).
Ravenscourt by Georgina Burns.
Walker has assembled a fine cast with the stand-out performance belonging to Josef Davies as Daniel, a ‘tricky’ case for the team of NHS psychotherapists who attempt to treat his chronic depression with a mere seven sessions of talking therapy. Burns has given the unemployed working-class 33-year-old man, who still lives with his equally troubled mother, the weightiest material – with barbs about the undeniable intersections of social inequality and scarce support as well a vivid first-person telling of the all-consuming struggle of mental illness and emotional anguish. Davies rises to the oratory’s potential with a searing, authentic and muscular enactment that offers a cathartic gut-punch without veering into the blatantly polemic. Jon Foster, the other male character of this four-hander, also shines as Arthur – a veteran NHS practitioner who presents no illusions about ‘cures’ or ‘redemption’ but, as we learn, gets on with the job with compassion and dignity not first seen by idealistic, and somewhat arrogant, newcomer Lydia (Lizzy Watts). The quartet of shrinks is completed by Andrea Hall who plays Denise, the supervisor running the workplace (a literal and metaphorical madhouse of types) with equanimity. Denise serves as a reminder of what is realistic but not perfect and the toll clinicians experience even with the most robust of boundaries.
As a starting showcase, Burns’ work is strong. However, as a full-fledged play, it hasn’t quite decided what it wants to be nor pushed the boundaries of its potential. Although Lydia, who recently arrived from private practice and determined to give her all to her patients, is the central character (and one suspects possibly a semi-autobiographical foil for the playwright who retrained as an NHS therapist after a career in other fields) she is the least developed role. Countertransference and her mother issues are hinted at but never really explored – leaving their dramatic value on the table, unexploited. In parts, Ravenscroft feels like a professional coming-of-age story – in which idealism crashes into pragmatism – but the script still doesn’t find the outer limits of embarrassment and redemption nor the humour such a tale needs (even though it does have some satisfyingly pithy and witty lines). I was occasionally reminded of the TV adaptation of Adam Kay’s NHS memoir This is Going to Hurt – but without as much dramatic or comic intensity. The play offered a few hints that Georgina Burns had something more to say about human connection through the relationship between Lydia and Daniel; how were they both transformed by their interactions? But the darkness of Lydia’s psyche remained only vaguely dusky for a few moments and then was put back in its box. I can’t help but wonder if it was her INSPIRE programme mentor Roy Williams who encouraged a tidy plot with no loose ends at the expense of a more theatrical exploration of the messy elements of the mind. Nonetheless, Burns’ ear for dialogue is strong and the play does not drag. Ravenscourt is a very strong start from a promising writer underpinned by expert direction and some impressive performances. I am eager to see what she writes next.
Idealistic and driven, Lydia is a mental-health professional determined to make a difference. She has given up her comfortable job in private practice to become a therapist at Ravenscourt – where society’s most in need can receive treatment. And making progress in treating Daniel – an angry and depressed young man who everybody else has written off – feels genuinely worthwhile. But as Lydia settles into the job, she starts to realise how high the odds are stacked against her being able to really change things for Daniel. Maybe the cynics are right: the system is broken and nobody cares…