2 - 28 Jun  |  For ages 6+

Unicorn Theatre in collaboration with Mark Storor and Anna Ledgard present

The Guardian, 5th June 2009
Review by Lyn Gardner

You might be forgiven for thinking that a piece of theatre for children, inspired by a family’s experience of living with renal disease, sounds worthy and unappealing. 

But there is nothing to forgive about this extraordinary, fierce and moving show, created by Mark Storor and his actors in the backstage spaces of the Unicorn theatre. Dressing rooms become spaces full of washing machines where sad-faced teddy bears drip dry on the line; a dressing table flickers with nightlights keepinghope alive; a tiny installation can be glimpsed in a scaffolding pipe; a nurse turns her care of a child on dialysis into a bit of a circus, as if she is personally clambering through his body and cleaning his blood.

Storor was artist-in-residence at the dialysis unit at the Evelina hospital school, London, and the stories of the children treated there are at the heart of this piece, giving it richness, texture and a tender intimacy. One child’s tiger motif reoccurs; another talks of feeling like the leaves of a cabbage, an idea later celebrated visually; a princess from the Land of Sick vomits Scrabble tiles. There is as much about the dynamics of family here as there is about illness.

Death, suggests one of the older children in a recording, is simply a door in a room that we have not yet noticed and won’t until our eyes adjust to the dark.

There is a lot of the dark here - a black-eyed figure stalks the family - but also a heart-breaking and ethereal beauty, not least in the mother who, when medicine fails, will try to keep her child alive through sheer force of will. It is a devastating theatrical journey that throws dazzling light on the idea of illness as metaphor.

 

Time Out, 17th June 2009
Review by Brian Logan

A family’s experience of living with kidney disease might not strike you as the stuff of high drama.  In the hands of Mark Storor, who devised For The Best with children at the Evelina Children’s Hospital School, it’s as magical as the circus and as epic as Greek tragedy.  The shoe takes time to grip; I was a little nonplussed by the opening stages, as the audience is led backstage at the Unicorn, through dressing rooms with earthen floors, past washing lines on which laundered teddy bears drip, and into a kitchen where a woman bakes muffins by the score.

We soon find out why.  We meet a boy undergoing dialysis, and the nurse who makes a fantastic voyage into his bloodstream; an acrobatic sequence that restores the wonder to medical procedure.  The family tries to normalise their son’s sickness: mother (she of the muffins) and sister go skipping with a rope created by tubes of the boy’s blood.  But father lingers; he’s scared to jump in.  It feels true, painfully so – never more so than when the boy’s mother physically wrestles with the kohl-eyed disease that is kidnapping her son.  ‘I don’t want to die/I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all’, runs the soundtrack, making more sense of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ than I’ve ever heard before.

This penumbral journey through one family’s nightmare is never less than beautiful: startlingly, when aerialist Kate Hart’s trapeze work suggests the churn of sickness; funnily, as when the boy’s father turns into a walking, cuddling mattress.

Its images are often oblique – the detritus of long-lost fairy tales and fevered sleeps – but they add up to an extraordinary and tender evocation of one family’s struggle to live with serious illness in their midst.

16 June 2009, Michael Coveney, What's On Stage
Doctor Theatre comes to the Unicorn

Possibly the most extraordinary show currently playing in London is For the Best at the Unicorn, a stunning mixture of art work, installation, backstage tour and promenade performance, devised by professionals working with children on dialysis.

You sit in the foyer and a white curtain is drawn across by a small child. Progressing through white corridors and dressing rooms, you are assailed by temperamental outbursts, the sight of a withdrawn girl cringing in a laundrette, a fraught mother baking cakes, a disturbed boy kicking a cabbage along a corridor.

That boy is given respite on dialysis in a hospital ward where the nurse climbs a rope then walks round the upper walls in a harness. Art house theatre has got under the skin of a disruptive illness and shown its terrible beauty.

All the time, small children from the various London schools involved, including the Evelina Hospital School, usher us quietly through the spaces and finally into the large square black arena — the theatre proper, I think — where the family bonds in tough love, and fairytales, and bed-time antics, while stalked by a black-eyed figure of illness in a skeleton waistcoat.

The most striking thing about the piece — devised and directed by Mark Storor and supported by the Wellcome Trust — is its mixture of charm and violence, the theatrical tension of coping with autistic behaviour, the domestic knock-on effect, the sudden switches between hope and helplessness.

We should all know much more about what other people go through if only to put our own good fortune in perspective, and it’s a rare theatre event that enforces a sense of social empathy to the extent that For the Best does.

But none of that would be effective without the very high standard of performance and concentration by the actors, and indeed the children, and the beauty of many of the scenes and settings.

After eighty minutes we emerged onto the street through the scene dock.The actors took no bows. The theatre staff were diffident. Children blinked in the unaccustomed sunlight. People scurried about their lunchtime business.

We’d been on a strange and disturbing journey but one not easily forgotten.

It made a very pleasant change indeed from the the usual round of theatre going on a critic’s agenda, and proved what can be done when big issue theatre is filtered through an inventive, poetic, and theatrical imagination.

In that respect, it’s possible to view For the Best as a sort of companion piece to Kursk at the Young Vic. And it’s just as well worth seeing and standing through, though you can squat at ground level during the final twenty minutes.