The Human Body review: Keeley Hawes dazzles in brimming drama about birth of the NHS

Lucy Kirkwood is in the midst of a prolific purple patch right now. There was 2020’s weird The Welkin at the National Theatre, the slippery That Is Not Who I Am at the Royal Court in 2022, and, last year, her brilliant musical adaptation of The Witches. You never catch her doing the same thing twice, not remotely.

Does the Chimerica playwright’s latest live up to those three pieces, which showed a writer at the top of her game? Sort of. The Human Body doesn’t quite strike at the heart or mess with the head in the same way, but the problem isn’t necessarily the play itself. It’s more that it’s bogged down by an overstuffed production.

On its own terms, it’s a fabulously rich piece of writing that flings itself between two worlds. Partly it’s a pot-banging political play about the founding of the dear old NHS set in the real world where there’s suffering and politics and prolapses, and partly a dreamy drama about a Hollywood romance set to a stirring Brief Encounter-style piano score.

And it’s got Keeley Hawes in it! The queen of the small screen plays Iris Elcock, doctor, housewife and local councillor with Westminster ambitions. She’s helped draw up plans for a national health service, and now needs to persuade other doctors (including her husband) and then the country to adopt it. She also falls in love with George Blythe (Jack Davenport), a Shropshire lad who’s made a name for himself in Hollywood playing bounders, cads and Nazis.

You can see why consummate screen actor Hawes is perfect for the role: directors Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee live-project long chunks of the play in dreamy black and white onto the back wall, turning Iris’s normal world into a close-up movie from the golden age of Hollywood.

Returning to the stage after more than a decade, Hawes dazzles. It’s a credit to her that you start looking for things to quibble about in her acting – that maybe she’s better doing the fine details you get on screen, that maybe her harried demeanour gets a bit one-note – when really her benchmark is so high that those minor niggles hardly matter. Alongside her is a wonderfully debonair Davenport as Blythe, oozing that old school Hollywood charm, traces of Cary Grant et al, without ever overdoing it.

Maybe it’s the presence of Hawes, but there’s a sense in which this brimming, hopeful piece of writing really wants to be a Sunday night telly drama. We’ve got this stirring character study of an incredible woman and her place in a society that, after the war, has decided it doesn’t need her now that the men are back.

But then there’s all this stuff that’s going on around it: the constant rumble of bits of set being wheeled on and off, cameras darting furtively, a slowly revolving stage. The three other cast members – Tom Goodman-Hill, Pearl Mackie and Siobhan Redmond – play all the other roles, popping off for a second and coming back with a new cardigan or wig and a new accent.

Yes, there’s some point here about artifice, fiction and escapism, and how the world of movies is fake and isn’t much like the real world. It’s just a bit too much. Longhurst and Yee seem determined to keep us aware of how the sausage is being made, when really you just want the beautiful, gripping, stirring, swooning…er, sausage.

Donmar Warehouse, until 13 April