In an attempt to kick start 2011 off with a bang, the Dolman Theatre has staged its first production of director Bruno Cook’s, ‘Nil by Mouth‘. However, if this play is to symbolise the play to follow over the months, then I warn you to be extremely cautious when buying your next ticket.

            Telling the story of an under staffed, over worked and under paid hospital in London, the two Act play opens with a song that sounds like a barber shop quartet gone seriously wrong. When the curtains go up the stage is decked out as “Wordsworth ward”, where I must give props to the prop supervisors for making the stage resemble the vulgarity of The Royal Gwent. And what hospital wouldn’t be complete without the “how the hell did you get this job” type of nurse, played by our very own Fran Keirle, (sounding a tad like Barbra Windsor).

            As the play goes on we meet more staff, (and by that I mean five medical staff, wow it really does resemble the Royal Gwent) the patients begin to emerge. Now when you first meet patient Evelyn Keats, (played by Ann Kelly) and her husband Hilary Keats (played by John Sheen) you do get a few dry laughs from the dominating wife and the weenie husband who toddles behind saying “yes dear”. But then it stops, the few little tickles they should have stuck with, turns into an over and over and over again joke at Alzheimer’s, its already been done find new jokes!

            It moves pretty much like that for the entire first act, where two patients obviously get their name tags switched, and both are mistaken to have obviously bad procedures; one gets a stomach pump, the other set for an operation. It’s just a little too obvious to be funny.

            Then suddenly in comes Inspector Gossling, (played by Eamonn Corbett), waving his magic wand, which miraculously transforms chaos into order, and even makes manikins turn into humans, (I known stroke patients don’t really move, but the obvious manikin head sticking out was of the bed sheets was just wrong). Until a patient freaks out, everyone runs around, everyone is screaming, and the play ends with two old men falling on a bed and mooning the audience.

            Ok all jokes and wrinkly bums aside, yes the idea of mixing two patients treatment up is comical, and the fact that there’s a nurse you can barely understand makes you go, “that sounds about right”, but these are cheap laughs based on serious issues. In the papers there have been many articles on babies being overdosed accidentally by nurses, or patients who go in for their tonsils out and end up with a hysterectomy, (I read about that somewhere) and that is something not to be laughed at. When watching the play, and you see the doctor has ’misplaced’ the notes, or the patient is waiting like four hours just for some results, it makes you think this is exactly what our health care system is, a big joke.

            In the programme available for £1.20, Director Bruno Cooks said, “When I first read ‘Nil by Mouth’ I can honestly say that I didn’t find it particularly funny”, and it wasn’t. ‘Nil by Mouth’ is just a rip off of the Carry On shows, complete with cheap jokes and geriatric men in nude thongs.