Response: Wonder Nurse, One on One Festival at BAC

What strikes me most about Wonder Nurse is that it is, in a surprisingly traditional manner, a comedy. Even though we are involved in a situation, asked to participate and make up the gaps, there is a sense in which one is laughing the wit of a script as written and delivered.

Walk into a room and you’ll be beckoned behind a curtain by a woman dressed – slightly cartoonishly – as a nurse. That ushering is not seductive and it’s not authoritarian, but businesslike; it’s just that it’s your turn – nothing more, nothing less. Introductions over, one is asked to put on a patient’s gown over your clothes (the sort used to comic effect in films because it leaves your bum exposed). Here, the effect is mildly unsettling: it suggests that all is not so well. Seated opposite Wonder Nurse, a wacky screwball of a character, you are questioned in that familiar manner (again) of a routine check-up. There’s no sense of interrogation. Rather it’s a checked list, reeled off at pace, cycled through.

Because, ultimately, it dawns on you that this is not really about your answers. Unlike many of these pieces, Wonder Nurse has no therapeutic qualities. It doesn’t take itself seriously or place itself wholly in the real world. Instead, it plays out the therapeutic situation with a droll twist; the questions, it becomes apparent, belong to the world of fairytale. They ask about your mother and father, about your mirror, about your relationship to talking woodland creatures. There is a lovely description in the programme notes: “Clinically unproven and medically useless.” All is done in jest, with a likeable grin and a refusal – for all that you might try – to actually resonate with your real life. That’s rather refreshing.

On a more serious level, Emma Rice – who has directed the piece with more than a lacing of Kneehigh’s childish spirit – is concerned with the healing power of stories. After all, this is what we are prescribed and – eyes closed, semi-relaxed – we are given a fairytale to swallow. And its delivered with real savour by Edith Tankus.

Wonder Nurse won’t change your life or restore you to well-being. It is, however, a theatrical nugget that will raise a smile and while away a few minutes. Cute, kooky and charmingly round the twist.