They can’t all be winners, all positive all the time. This show.. disappointed me. Adam Kay wrote the hugely successful ‘This is Going to Hurt’ back in 2017, which has been claimed a “literary sensation”, selling well over 3 million copies and later becoming a BBC Bafta Award-Winning series… Undoctored is the follow-up to that book, this time featuring more about Adam’s life after medicine, once he had quit being a junior doctor and how things have changed for him both professionally and personally following his decision to leave medicine and become a writer.
Kay starts the show by stating that this is not a comedy show. Although being listed as one because there ‘was no section on man reads stories from his own book on stage’. Kay then proceeds to.. literally read aloud stories from his book entitled; Undoctored. He breaks this down into three sections each of which have three to four different stories within them. (I won’t spoil which stories he chose to tell), but will say that he includes the ‘degloving’ story, two about being an awful patient and a few others. – He was right, this wasn’t a comedy show. Some of it series, some of it had a funny moment or two when he delivered the punchline.
I don’t know what else to say really.. Go read the book if you want to know more… I personally cannot recommend that you go and see the show, I didn’t expect him to literally read out stories from the book. Perhaps use them as jumping off points for leading to more in-depth stories or something else. He also had a keyboard on stage and.. went on to sing / play a couple of songs. I cannot say they felt much in the way of originality.. A song about all of the drugs he learnt as a doctor was one of them, set to the infamous tune of I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major-General from the Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert & Sullivan.. it was a one trick pony of a song, I thought. Another song featured a conversation supposedly with another doctor or something illustrating how Kay passed his written exams fine but couldn’t remember a thing when it came to physical exams.
The set was simple, as shown above. A keyboard setup atop of two giant pill bottles and another one as a lectern behind which Kay stood to read the stories from his book. My seat was amazing, but perhaps a little wasted on this particular show. No end of leg room. The theatre was.. not full, not I would say ‘sold-out’ as expected. All in all, perhaps it was.. for the best that Kay left the medical profession… and he’s clearly a talented writer… I am not sure I really see what the hype is about however when it comes to performing his own material on the stage. In all seriousness, Kay finishes the show talking about some of his work to recognise the PTSD and mental health issues facing the modern doctor in the world we live in and within the National Health Service. Clearly he is serious about trying to leave a legacy to identify and memorialise the awful statistics that face doctors and medical staff in terms of suicide. He does so by taking a concept from the aforementioned TV show and is raising money to be able to offer each NHS trust the chance / opportunity to have one of these memorials planted within their grounds. On a personal note, one of the stories Kay retells is about the premature birth of his youngest daughter who he introduces with a series of photographs at the end of the show, the climax being when he leaves the stage only to return with baby Ruby in his arms to take his final applause. – A lovely ending.. I guess.
It wasn’t at all what I expected.. and I did buy this book when it was first published, but I don’t recall reading it all, unlike the first one, which was a laugh a minute. Not saying that each and every comedic show should be laugh out loud funny, but perhaps I feel there was a little in the way of mis-selling with this one. I don’t feel like I was the only one in that audience there tonight that felt the same way. A bit of a shame, but, on to the next. I would go so far as to say that the train guard / conductor added the missing elements of funniness to tonight’s proceedings on the return journey home by providing short additional snippets of information about the station we were arriving at, the fact that it was not a Northern train and apologising for carriage A smelling like weed. Later he would confirm that he had found the culprit with the weed and announced again when he was leaving the train… the weed guy, not the conductor.
