Bringing Pressure Cooker to Edinburgh Fringe and theSpace on the Mile, writer Jessie Millson explores the pressure placed on medical students and also how we trust those looking after our bodies, if they can’t look after their own.
Pressure Cooker, in its original form, is a full length play, and according to the show’s website had been scheduled to run at the University of Bristol before being pulled over concerns about its content. So it comes to Edinburgh in much shortened form, running at fifty minutes.
Four medical students are still drunk and high from an evening of celebrations, as they’ve just completed their sixth year of medical school. But there’s a first year lying on the kitchen table, Florence is unconscious and appears to have also consumed a lot of alcohol and drugs.
The students (somewhat bizarrely) have opted not to call an ambulance, but have decided to treat the fresher themselves. As they ponder over the evening’s events, trying to form a diagnosis, the group spend an equal amount of time dissecting their own relationships.
Mati seems to be the leader of the group, giving out instructions, and there’s some kind of live triangle emerging between Tiff, Wilf and Harvey.
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As the play progresses we start to understand the group’s motivations a little better, and there’s a good bit of character development in a short space of time. The alcohol and drug culture at university is brutally laid bare and Pressure Cooker is successful in its aim of putting substance abuse in the context of medical professionals.
Where audiences will struggle with this is the notion that a group of four, now qualified doctors, would repeatedly keep leaving someone in medical distress to drink tea, smoke and talk about their love lives. Perhaps in the full length version this is navigated with more authenticity, but in this shorter outing it struggles to be believable.
You might also assume that having been cut down things might move quickly, but actually the opposite is true, with Pressure Cooker moving more slowly than it needs to. Too many long pauses and handling of props distract us from the story at hand.
The cast however do a very good job, this is an intense play by its very nature, and they all succeed in maintaining that energy throughout, Jamie Egan is particularly convincing as Mati, while Hannah Kendall delivers a devastating soliloquy as Florence.
Pressure Cooker is definitely a play with a future, it does perhaps need that longer run time to solidify some of the reasoning, but on the whole it’s a promising start from this emerging company.
