David Hennessy spoke to Barra Fitzgibbon, Katherine White and Michael Mahony, who are all involved with a play coming to the West End about Barra’s real life brush with the Grim Reaper in the days of the pandemic.
An Irish man living in London’s true story of life and death during the darkest days of COVID is coming to the West End stage.
In the early days of the pandemic, Barra Fitzgibbon (54), from Killiney in Dublin, was taken into Lewisham Hospital ill from a new virus that little was known about.
From his ICU bed, he saw the pandemic unfold with 20 patients becoming 60.
He describes it as both ‘a war zone’ and something from a film such as 28 Days Later.
But it was no movie, it was a very real crisis the NHS was struggling with.
But more than a play about COVID or the pandemic, it’s a man’s fight for life.
Barra would get his story out first in a blog that would strike a chord.
He would then develop it into a play with the help of playwright and actress Katherine White who would also perform it.
It would get its first airing at Bloomsbury Festival.
Narrated by the Grim Reaper, it now comes to the West End with Katherine sharing the main role with Irish actor Michael Mahony while Daniel Clarkson directs.
Barra told The Irish World: “I obviously got it very bad and then I went into Lewisham Hospital.
“I went in there and was not quite sure what was going on, nobody knew. Just thought I had some kind of bad cold.
“And then it all kicked off.
“I went on to a ward initially and they were hoping things would recover.
“They didn’t.
“They kept spiralling and then eventually ICU stepped in.
“It was a crazy time because you didn’t see anyone’s faces.
“You only really saw people’s eyes because everybody was in PPE.
“Even when the ambulance came out to bring me into the hospital, it was like something out of 28 days later.
“Anyway went into a briefed coma which is very different to a coma because when you’re briefed that you’re going into a coma, it’s a very different experience.
“When you go into a coma, it’s usually off the back of a sudden impact scenario and this wasn’t that.
“This was, ‘We’re putting you into one’.
“That was a very challenging thing to go in sober, if you like, into an experience like that and being told that you had a certain percentage of survival.
“Went into the coma and then obviously, without giving the plot away, the happy ending came out.
“The reason why the play is called Patient: Soldier is because I was the first one to wake up.
“Others obviously woke up after me but I was the first one to wake up so the consultants in ICU in Lewisham just nicknamed me ‘Soldier’.
“They never called me Barra.
“They called me ‘Soldier’ all the time.
“There’s a lot of comedy in this because when I woke up, they just didn’t know what to do with me.
“They couldn’t move me out of ICU because they were worried I was still contagious.
“They just didn’t know where to put me so one of the constant, confusing conversations of the day was, ‘Jesus, where are we putting Soldier today? Where is soldier going to go today?’
“And they would shove you in a corner here and shove you in a corner there, and then I kind of just watched everything play out like a movie.
“Usually when you’re in that position, they get you out straight away but I couldn’t get out because they didn’t know where to put me.
“I ended up watching 20 patients become 60 patients.
“I watched people die in front of me.
“I watched all sorts.
“It truly was a war zone.
“Those young ICU people, they’re absolutely extraordinary.
“They’re just brilliant anyway but they’re very militant.
“It’s very quick and fast moving and fast paced.
“It was extraordinary.
“But there was a lot of comedy in there as well.
“One of the characters in the play that Michael and Katherine will be having a crack at will be Nurse Andrew.
“He was a klutz.
“He was the funniest guy.
“He would arrive to the bed and always rip out some kind of tube or rip out something that’s in my vein, and was very funny about it.
“He was just the life and soul of the place.
“He was really comedic in his approach even though he was bursting inside with all the anxiety.
“I wrote a blog when I came out.
“I just thought, ‘I gotta write stuff down’.
“And it felt quite cathartic.
“And that blog went quite viral.
“COVID is the setting of this.
“The story is actually not about COVID.
“The story is about love.
“The story is about hope.
“The story is about dealing with trauma through a lens of comedy, poignancy.
“I guess the real important bit, the game changer for me, was the realisation that people do love you and people want you to live.
“I remember that being a real kind of, ‘Sh*t, I need to survive this thing because I gotta get home’.
“That maybe goes unspoken beforehand but that was suddenly being spoken by my wife and the kids.
“They were suddenly saying stuff like, ‘You’ve got to get home. We need you’, that kind of stuff.
“That kind of stuff is very powerful.
“I had met Katherine through Bloomsbury Festival.
“I knew if she was keen, she could do something with this, she could structure it.
“So she took it away.
“She decided to make the Grim Reaper a much bigger character.
“There’s a lot of real life stuff in there and then there’s a lot of hallucinatory stuff in there.
“All the hallucinations happened.
“These conversations with Reaper happened.
“Sometimes they happened when I was back home recovering because when you’re on those heavy drugs, when you come off those drugs of being in a coma, you really trip, you trip quite crazily.
“I think Katherine saw the value in those hallucinations and she took Reaper and made Reaper narrate the story effectively.
“Then we workshopped the hell out of it. We worked on it, worked on it, worked on it, structured it, changed it, ripped up bits, started again on bits, and we’ve come out with this piece.
“We pitched it into Bloomsbury Festival.
“They said, ‘Okay’, sold out 123 tickets for the night and it just went down like a storm.
“I thought people were going to say the usual things: ‘Really well written, guys’, ‘Well done’.
“You’d expect those usual things to be said, but actually a lot of people were coming up and just saying, ‘Thank you for giving us a space to process this thing’.
“Because it’s been buried and shoved in the corner.
“This is what we do to all of our pandemics.
“We don’t do it to our wars.
“We write books and plays and scripts and movies and TV series about wars non-stop but show me one about a pandemic, maybe a handful max.
“Spanish Flu, Black Death, all these things that have happened, we tend to bury them and I don’t think we allow people to kind of mourn it a bit and process it a bit.
“There was a real outpouring of gratitude for that.
“That was a really pleasant surprise.”
Tell how us the story first spoke to you, Katherine..
Katherine: “I remember, to the day, when Barra emailed.
“He had told me briefly about his time in COVID, and I remember that shook all of us.
“And to meet Barra, he’s so positive and has this infectious energy.
“You would never think something that traumatic would have happened.
“I remember Barra rang me and I was on the train.
“I was firstly very honoured to read Barra’s memoirs.
“I think the first page I thought, ‘Yeah, this definitely can translate to the stage and definitely needs to’.
“Literally by the time I got to my final stop, I’d already just said to Barra, ‘Yes, I’ll do it’.
“And I remember coming out of Tonbridge station and my aunt was meeting me, ‘Are you okay?’
“I was like, ‘I’ve just read this incredible story’.
“And we walked from the bottom of Tonbridge all the way up to the castle and she was like, ‘You have to do this, this is incredible’.
“I think I was struck by how much like a tidal wave those events hit just everyone and how Barra just stayed so strong.
“Words can help you stay alive.
“I think before that, it was a bit of a cliché.
“I thought in my head, ‘Do we want to talk about this (COVID)?’
“From the moment I read it I was like, ‘Well, this isn’t just about COVID, this is about Barra’s life. This is about a fight’.
“I remember saying, ‘It’s not a COVID story, it’s your story’.
“It’s a very frightening, very raw story of survival and I think that was something we discussed very early on.
“Yes, this happened in in COVID times but it’s so much more than that.
“I think, as I wrote it, I found ways of dealing with the shock and the trauma of it.
“I don’t know how else to describe it other than Barra’s story then ended up saving me because I went through a very sudden loss and it completely shook me.
“And suddenly Barra’s story was there to pull me out of that darkness.
“I remember, again talking to my aunt, being like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this’.
“I was hollow.
“I was a shell of myself.
“And she was like, ‘This story needs to be heard. You have to do it’.
“And everywhere we went across London, we were rehearsing and practicing and people would be walking past and go, ‘Sorry, I just heard that. What are you doing?’
“I was like, ‘Oh, we’re rehearsing a play and it’s real’.
“And again, to me, Barra is so unassuming and just has this absolute will to live and to create things and is proof that love and determination can win.
“I hope it comes across in the play.
“But oh my God, to have been able to have worked with Barra crafting it is a completely unforgettable experience.
“I’m very grateful.”
Michael, tell us about how you came to the piece and a role..
Michael: “Seeing the fun that can be had while dealing with such a tricky topic, that’s kind of what drew me in.
“I thought, ‘Okay, so it’s not an hour and a half of talking about COVID’, because that’s not what this play is.
“Like Barra just said, that’s the setting, that’s the backdrop but really, it was clear from the script that I got that this is a story about life and it’s about a story about living.
“It’s not a story about dying.
“We went through this.
“It was a shared experience.
“It wasn’t just Barra who went through this.
“In the play that’s reflected in all the different characters that we meet, that everyone’s going through this thing together in different ways and we’re just seeing it through the eyes of this one character.
“In the dark time, sometimes the darkness amplifies the light and that’s what a setting like this kind of does.
“I think that’s very much in this play.
“That was exciting to read.
“That’s kind of what drew me into it, the chance to explore the lighter side of things as well as dealing with the heaviness of the story that it is.”
Katherine you described it as like a tidal wave..
Katherine: “No one gave us blueprints for this.
“There was no right way of doing it and especially so early on, it is almost unimaginable and yet somehow Barra’s got through it.
“I think that’s what this story celebrates.”
Michael: “Our story couldn’t be any more universal than this because everyone went through it in their own way.
“What Barra went through was an extreme version of that but everyone went through a version of being a soldier in some shape or form and so I think that reading it on the page, it’s impossible not to be able to relate to the subject matter we’re dealing with because, like I said, we’re all soldiers to some degree.”
Katherine and Michael, is it emotional to put yourself into Barra’s place which was very literally and in real life looking death in the face?
Katherine: “Yeah, 100%.
“Every line is important and means something and you feel that in your body.
“You feel it in your bones.
“I think very, very much.
“It’s a story of survival.
“No matter how much I think about it, how much we wrote it, I will never truly understand what Barra went through.”
Michael: “It can be, at times, an emotional script.
“It’s a little bit daunting actually because there’s a lot to undertake.”
Is it emotional for you, Barra? It must take you back to your own brush with mortality..
Barra: “I just feel nervousness for the actors, that’s what I feel when they perform.
“Because I’ve been writing this thing since almost the second I got out, I think that was my therapy.
“I remember doctors just could not believe I didn’t have PTSD from this, couldn’t believe that what I saw in there didn’t give me nightmares, have me up in the night, all that kind of stuff.
“And it just never came in.
“And I think it never came in for me because I got pen to paper as quickly as I possibly could.
“I just felt this urge.
“I remember when I woke up, and this is now in the play, everybody was around the bed when I woke up.
“I couldn’t understand why everybody was there and then they told me later they did it as a motivational exercise because I was the first one to wake up.
“They got all the staff, all the cleaners, everybody literally packed around the bed to see me wake up.
“I think it was later that day this ICU surgeon Charlie came back to me and, I don’t know why he said this but he said to me, ‘I think you’ve got something, some important role to play in all of this nightmare. I don’t know what it is’.
“Maybe he was just feeling emotional and I was feeling emotional, that was it.
“But that stayed with me.
“I think that was the energy to write this, to write this down.”
Another knock on effect of not dealing with it is that these heroes who work in the NHS, and what they did, gets forgotten..
Barra: “You’ve nailed it.
“It’s also a love letter to the NHS.
“That’s what it is at the end of the day because I wouldn’t be back here.
“I wouldn’t be talking to you now without them.”
How does the Irish nurse Andrew like his portrayal in the play?
Barra: “That’s such a great question because we were so worried about it.
“He loves it.
“He absolutely loves it.
“He comes across in such a gorgeous, caring light, there’s no way he couldn’t love it.
“Because that’s what he is.
“He was born to be a nurse.
“He was just a special human being because he did things that no other medical practitioner did.
“He would finish his shift and then he would phone my family.
“I just cannot tell you what those phone calls did for Jen and the kids to be able to get through it.
“Don’t forget I’m in my coma.
“I’m asleep for all of this.
“It’s the ones at home who are broken, who are not sleeping, who are trying to get messages and no one’s picking up the phone, can’t visit because of the lockdown, all this kind of stuff.
“But Andrew just had it in him, it was just a natural thing that he has.
“He saw, ‘I need to call that family and let them know what’s going on’.”
Could it have another life beyond this run of dates?
Barra: “This is not the end.
“If it is, it’s more than I ever imagined anyway.”
Kathrine: “It’s a universal story.
“I want it to be performed by anyone and seen by everyone.
“I think that’s the message of this piece.”
Patient: Soldier plays Seven Dials Playhouse, London 25- 27 April.
To book and for more information, click here.