TIGER COUNTRY

What does a stressed-out doctor do when he gets home at 9am after a night shift? Settle down to an episode of Doctors on daytime telly, of course, washed down with a couple of tinnies. Medics, just like the rest of us, can’t get enough of hospital dramas. But few soaps are as probing and plausible as Nina Raine’s funny, tense, scarily convincing drama, Tiger Country, set in an A&E department in a London hospital.

Raine’s play is not specifically about NHS cuts, though it shows staff shortages testing an already exhausted workforce. Instead, she takes the pulse of the doctors working there and finds rocketing levels of stress and an increasing cynicism among idealistic young ones having to accept that they can’t save everyone.

Early on, a newly qualified 24-year-old, Emily, refuses to admit defeat when a woman her age is brought into resus. At the end of the play, when treating another lifeless patient, she submits to the sad reality much more quickly. But it is clear that something has died in Emily too.

Raine also directs the busy traffic of purposeful staff (dozens superbly played by a versatile dozen) dressed strictly in accordance with their status on a wide blue vinyl floor between two banks of seats. During one procedure Vashti (a superbly clever, conflicted Indira Varma), an ambitious British Indian urologist, slips when removing a diseased testicle. This is the tiger country of the title, the jungle of veins and arteries through which a surgeon must navigate, and with just the tiniest snick, becomes a swamp of gushing blood. A consultant steps in to salvage things. Emily is told to scratch his itchy nose.

The rigid hospital hierarchy, however, is only as shocking as the blatant racism and sexism. Vashti claims that the ‘fat, black nurses’ won’t obey her (a hilariously surly, slow-motion Wunmi Mosaku proves the point) because she is neither white nor male. Vashti has spent her career sounding white and posh in order to compete with the largely public-school chaps. ‘Nurses aren’t sexy any more. They’re all Filipinos now. Physios are the new nurses,’ says dishy doctor, Mark (Nick Hendrix).

Raine also shows doctors on the powerless, receiving end of treatment. A much more sympathetic doctor (Alastair Mackenzie) has a life-threatening tumour; Vashti’s beloved aunt’s operation has been fatally botched by the casual consultant. Drained and depleted as she is, she musters herself to tell an old actor with cancer that there is nothing more to be done with a gentleness that almost breaks your heart. Like Raine, she doesn’t sugar the pill. The audience, like this man, is in splendidly safe hands.

Until 17 January at the Hampstead Theatre, London NW3: 020-7722 9301, www.hampsteadtheatre.com