“The most shocking thing about my attempt on my life was not that it failed but that I felt the urge to end my life in the first place. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t the pressure of work… it was depression pure and simple.”
The Royal College of Nursing has seen a steep rise in recent years of nursing staff seeking help for suicidal thoughts, 76% in the first half of 2024. Nurses’ distress has been shaped by workload, workplace culture, discrimination, fatigue, moral distress, caring responsibilities outside work, and whether staff feel safe enough to ask for help. Blue was commissioned from Brian Daniels of Pluto Productions, who specialises in writing bespoke plays that professional actors perform script-in-hand. Discussion and reflection follow each performance.
Before seeing the play, I was privileged to meet a nurse, now working for the RCN, who attempted to take her own life owing to the pressures she felt under nineteen years ago, and was then sectioned. I understand that she has been the driving force, as well as the RCN’s Head of Nursing Practice, Stephen Jones, in commissioning this deceptively simple but ultimately very powerful piece of drama lasting thirty-five minutes.
Brian Daniels interviewed ‘dozens’ of nursing staff of all ages and grades before embarking on this piece of almost verbatim theatre. We meet Zoe (Sophie Turner), a fifty-five-year-old nurse who feels tired all the time and who does not wish to work full-time but has to as she has a husband, Mark (Brian Daniels) on long-term sick leave owing to having lifted too many heavy patients as a hospital nurse. Her brother Tom (Dean Hutchinson) has learning difficulties and lives in supportive accommodation. When Zoe turns up for a typical twelve-hour shift, she seems totally exhausted and her friend Libby (Marie Fortune) telephones her hospital’s “occupational health” department, who seem much more interested in whether or not it is a ‘safeguarding’ issue rather than trying to help! Eventually Zoe does receive some counselling from Wendy (Clare Summerskill) even though at first she tries to bluff her way that there is nothing wrong. We also meet mental health nurses Rafi (Adil Malik) and Fola (Lucie Lutte).
All the actors involved give sterling performances, especially Sophie Turner who is so believably poignant in role – to be frank, in whatever walk of life we are, we all know someone like her. We think it is going to be her story, and are very surprised later when we discover that in fact it is really someone else’s…
Clare Summerskill is very calm and poised as the therapist, someone it would be easy to have trust in. Stephen Jones said that he had come across a husband just like Brian Daniel’s portrayal of Mark and, to be frank, my father could be just like that as well! He could have learned to do simple cooking, or to look after himself and help my mother more when she was ill, but just wouldn’t: it wasn’t a husband’s job in those days! Everyone in the play has so much motivation for what they do and say, even if they try to keep it hidden, and, as I have already said, this deceptively simple piece of theatre gradually becomes exceedingly powerful and very moving. The quote at the top of this review comes from the final page of the play when many of the characters are allowed a short soliloquy.
After the play has finished and the audience is beginning to relax, there is time allowed for reflection and discussion based on a useful and fascinating printed programme which not only gives further information about the different characters, it also asks what we can all do, and what needs to be done about mental health in the workplace. As the former nurse whom I wrote about at the top of this review says: “Emotions are our shared human language. We all know what it is like to feel sad, happy, angry, fearful – it’s how we connect with another person, even if we don’t share their story. Yet. Emotions are what we often struggle to share, speak and hear“.
This is a superb piece of work on every level – I felt quite drained with emotion by the end of the play itself, and even more so having reflected with others on what we had seen and been affected by. This is something which should be seen and experienced by as many people as possible and the RCN is hoping that NHS Hospital Trusts throughout Britain will find an opportunity to share it with their nursing and other medical staff so that mental health and wellbeing may be dealt with more sympathetically and with knowledge. Very highly recommended – if you get a chance to see it, take it!
Review by John Groves
BLUE
A Pluto Productions Play
Royal College of Nursing, 21 July 2026
Very complimentary review and all praise for Brian Daniels and the actors and support staff. It is not just nurses but medical staff who now feel very often overwhelmed by the whole ghastly situation that NHS finds itself in .
exactly so. Health care staff of all sorts are nder intense pressure… and it takes its toll…