Live Report Patient: Soldier reminds of the importance of community post-covid the Civic Theatre

Patient: Soldier, performed at the Civic Theatre in Tallaght, brings the Grim Reaper to your doorstep, taking you through the all too real experience of Covid.

Writer Barra Fitzgibbon and writer/actress Katherine White won’t let you forget the haunting reality of sickness spreading, overwhelmed nurses, and lives lost due to the pandemic. The play plunges the audience back into the harrowing early days of lockdown: the cancelled plans, the constant news updates, and the chilling proximity of a deadly, yet still unknown, virus.

Katherine White portrays all the characters of the play, including fictionalised versions of Barra and his wife, Jen, the real-life couple upon whom the play is based. The play is co-written by White and is drawn from a blog detailing Barra Fitzgibbon's actual experience of being the 1st Covid ICU survivor in the UK.

The intimate space of the Civic Theatre, where audience members are shoulder to shoulder, shows just how much has changed in just six years since the days of social distancing. The set is minimal: one table, a chair, playing cards, a bottle of hand sanitiser, and a banana, providing sparse clues but a myriad of mysteries.

White opens the play in scrubs, assessing the audience. She engages in an attempted, but intentionally failed, audience interaction that acts as a clever critique of our lingering post-Covid confinement. She then embodies the main antagonist, Dr. Reaper, a personification of the Grim Reaper. This character provides much of the play's dark humour, with quips about the NHS and mocking society’s eerily calm reaction to chaos.

The play charts the character Barra’s journey from the first cough to his final fight with the Reaper during his coma, with the story playing out like an action movie trapped in a coma patient's mind. The hospital becomes a battleground in which Barra, his family, friends, and nurses must fight off death together.

White’s versatile performance carries the production. She seamlessly switches between a seven characters, from a drunken Cork man, a terrified wife, and a musically gifted nurse. She brings them vividly to life against the backdrop of death, and her ability to pivot between accents, impressions, and improvisation shows an observational element to her acting.

The constant back-and-forth between characters and the rapid shifts in tone, from black humour to profound darkness, can occasionally confuse the storyline. Some set or costume changes might also have helped to orient the audience, though it should be said that this very confusion effectively mirrors Barra’s own distorted reality as a coma patient.

The play's emotional high point arrives in the closing moments with a recorded voicemail: the actual, pain-filled, joyous, and relieved message Jen Fitzgibbon received when learning her husband had woken from his coma and was coming home.

“What was great for Katherine is that it’s very rare that you get to work with the people that it’s about; she was able to ask us a lot and get to know us,” said Jen Stubbs. “She gets our mannerisms and our essence. It’s such an amazing piece to come out of such a traumatic time.”

Patient Soldier engages with a reality we all remember, infusing it with wit, sadness, and ultimately, a profound celebration of life in the face of death. The play is not only a passion project but a project that has created community. A family-run play where White takes on almost a daughter-like position to the real Barra and Jen. After so much community was lost due to Covid, it’s funny how a play about the pandemic can bring so many people back to being close.

“I realised for the first time that I was actually loved,” said Barra Fitzgibbon. “I realised that people were bawling their eyes out, saying get home to us, and that gives you a fight that gives you a sense of ‘I’m gonna fight this thing!’ We talk about apathy in the play; apathy is the biggest killer in the world, not disease.”