BLACK HOLE SIGN
Tron Theatre
★★★★
“entertaining and thought provoking”
Tron Theatre’s latest offering Black Hole Sign, a co-production with Traverse Theatre Company and in association with National Theatre of Scotland, is a gripping and necessary reflection of the current state of our National Health Service. Written by Uma Nada-Rajah, a practicing nurse in critical care with NHS Scotland, and directed by Gareth Nicholls, the show offers a powerful show of Scottish humour which offers levity from its bleak message.
The show is split along two timelines, at once following the events of a night on an NHS nursing ward while also giving us glimpses to a tribunal happening in the future. The titular Black Hole Sign, a radiological marker seen on a CT scan of the brain, rears its head as a diagnosis early in the show while at the same time, in a stunning parallel, we see a literal hole in the ceiling which will prove a challenge to the workers throughout the night. Alongside an array of colourful characters, the show details the journey of the two main nurses on call that evening in the understaffed ward and we watch on with a sense of foreboding as things begin to inevitably go wrong for the pair and their patients.
The set design (Anna Orton) offers a naturalistic representation of an NHS nursing ward which serves the piece beautifully. It is adaptable though, and during a delightful hallucinatory sequence in which the charmingly grumpy Mr Turnbull (Martin Docherty) is accidentally given nebulised ketamine, the set allows for the striking fantasies to take hold. The lighting (Lizzie Powell) is suitably stark for the setting with excellent clarity for the moments in which we are transported to the future tribunal. The sound design for the piece (Michael John McCarthy) was effective in providing an uncomfortable and tense underscore for what was to come, but the sung compositions seemed out of place.
The acting was superb across the board, with heart and humour shining through in equal measures. Helen Logan delivered a supreme performance as the powerful but flawed senior charge nurse Crea, a woman whose professional ethos ‘service delivered to people based on medical need, and no other criteria’ runs deep in everything she does. Betty Valencia as student nurse Lina was a lovely contrast to the rest of the ensemble and managed to both endear and frustrate the audience with her charm and ineptitude. The cast excelled in their multi-roling, making the stage feel twice as full with rounded and nuanced characters.
For all this show excels in its design and performances, it misses the punch slightly on the lasting impact for the audience. With grand lines such as ‘from the ashes of war they dreamt up a new Jerusalem: the National Health Service’, one expects the show to rouse the troops a little more in its final moments. Additionally, the show sets up very early a sense that something bad is going to happen. This makes the audience wait on tenterhooks throughout the performance as we try and get ahead of the script to guess the final big twist. I personally quite liked this element, it made the whole show feel like a murder mystery game with me, the sleuth detective, sitting in my seat thinking I’d be able to work the thing out before the actors. But those games are fun because of how far removed they are from reality. I wonder if this element of playful suspense downplayed the heartbreak in the not-so-far-from-real-life ending we were presented with.
Overall Black Hole Sign offers an entertaining and thought provoking night out, with top class performances and a strong message. It might not revolutionize the country and the health service on its own, but it certainly leaves audiences mulling what might be done to protect such a vital organ of our country.
BLACK HOLE SIGN
Tron Theatre
Reviewed on 23rd September 2025
by Kathryn McQueen
Photography by Mihaela Bodlovic
Previously reviewed by Kathryn:
EVITA | ★★★★ | LONDON PALLADIUM | July 2025
THE BOY WITH WINGS | ★★★ | POLKA THEATRE | June 2025
