Jamaica's lesson to the NHS

In 2000, Joe Penhall's incendiary Blue/Orange stirred up fierce debate on issues of black identity and mental illness against the backdrop of a crumbling, cruelly incompetent NHS.

Pat Cumper's enjoyably insightful work, The Key Game, does not employ the same naked polemic and tactical firebombs as Penhall's drama yet an equally strident political point is made in her humane and intelligent portrayal of three black men locked up in a debt-ridden Jamaican mental hospital.

There is a faint whiff of Beckett in the setting, which consists of one room dominated by three iron bedsteads and a high-up window with bars on it. As the play opens, the sound of the sea washes over the three men sleeping there, who only start moving when the eldest - a gnarled, hunched figure called Gonzales (Marc Matthews) - climbs up to the window and makes mournful, inarticulate sounds.

Gonzales's secrets prove the most shocking in two hours where fine acting and an incisive script ensure that the production by black company, Talawa, never degenerates into call-me-a-liberal worthiness.

The danger, too, is avoided that this drama about mental illness simply creates specimens for the patronising middle-class eye to analyse. Instead, each individual is shaped unformulaically by both comedy and tragedy so that they grow beyond labels such as obsessive compulsive or schizophrenic.

Meet, for instance, Kevin Harvey's gleamingly groomed, academically selfpossessed Shakespeare - a former teacher who effortlessly lapses into Keats odes or Bard sonnets, yet cannot walk through a door without taking carefully-calculated

steps and knocking on the door frame. Harvey's performance stands out in this very strong cast, his veneer of control masking the emotional chaos that has made him a victim of an unforgiving society.

Looming over the fates of Shakespeare, Gonzales and Dappo (Sylvano Clarke) is the decision by the Jamaican authorities to demolish the hospital because it occupies valuable real estate. Cumper's play may be set in Jamaica, but in a Britain where the disastrous effects of Care in the Community can still be witnessed, and a cash-strapped NHS is watching old hospital buildings being converted into luxury flats, the cynicism and disregard of the authorities in The Key Game has too many resonances.

Cumper's drama works so well because it makes its points by emphasising the characters' humanity rather than the misfortunes dealt out to them both by life and the system. This is a resonant triumph for Talawa.

The Key Game