Safe Delivery Reviews

Safe Delivery Dynamic Earth (in The Stage, Aug 17)

At first glance there is not a lot going in the oomph stakes for Safe Delivery - it all looks just a wee bit, well, safe. Yet another 'science' play, yet another scenario of bright young thing jolting her jaded peers into redeeming themselves - plus Hawkwind on the soundtrack. Yet by the end of Tom McGrath's play it is clear a remarkable transformation of these basic elements has transpired. A doctorate student joins a lab team researching genetic delivery techniques to destroy cancer cells. Quicker than she can get her petri dishes out, everyone has their agenda on the test-bench where commercial interests jostle thwarted ambitions and humanity takes a backburner. Directed sensitively by Nicholas Bone, Irene Allan and Jay Manley shine as feisty postgraduate and golden-hearted lab nerd, no less ably supported by Mary McCusker, Greg Powrie and Robin Thomson. The theory is surprisingly easy to follow, while an effective video narrative from a hospital patient provides a moody backdrop. Dramatically and personally moving, particularly if you've watched someone of similar age who's very close to you die - Allan's stunning, heart-rending bedside scene says it all. West End stuff this, with a bit of work. Film On Four, better.

Nick Awde

Safe Delivery

Drams: None = unmissable
Venue: Scottish International at Dynamic Earth (Venue 18)
Address: Holyrood Rd
Reviewer: Thelma Good

Tom McGrath has brought to this exciting new fringe venue a deservedly award winning play. Dealing with the cutting edge of science and medicine it leads us into the world of research where science is not as pure as we are lead to believe. Beneath the white lab coats of his researchers beat as much and as many passions as in any other walk of life. Even Science has not purified them. Director Nicholas Bone and his strong cast flesh out these essentially human scientists who discover in the course of the play that whilst we can map the human genome it is impossible to map the human heart. Go to the play if you want to know what goes on in the search for cures and more knowledge, where terminally ill patients lie and wait and sometimes researchers lie and don't wait. Also to see how people out-manoeuvre one another.

Safe Delivery is a play on many levels - sometime funny, sometimes deeply moving but always engaging. Have a dram afterwards to think over what you've seen.

Debate, not didacticism

Shining some scientific light through the anger and the acne at Edinburgh

Sara Abdulla

Amid the angry comedy, fire-eating mime and acne-encrusted Molière of this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, there are three plays funded by the Wellcome Foundation, "not to be didactic but to engender debate". Three good, thought-provoking, skilfully produced dramas that should send scientists and non-scientists into the night with some meaty ideas to chew on....Safe Delivery, another Science on Stage and Screen recipient (to the tune of £36,000) is the likeable result of a collaboration between the venerable playwright Tom McGrath and his geneticist daughter Julie Webb, of the Institute of Child Health in London. Ostensibly about viral gene therapy, it is also about the people beneath the lab coats. "It has struck me as odd since the seventies," says McGrath, "that there are so many scientists in theatre audiences and yet they are never represented on stage." He addresses that problem in many enjoyable ways. Set in a UK university genetics lab, Safe Delivery is a simple drama of human frailty, loss, vanity, ambition, disappointment and love. Some of the basic science is worryingly tabloid - gene therapy straight from test tube to human in three months without going via animals? But the characters are otherwise spot on, delicious in their astute, bitchy, fleshy colour. The lecherous, camera-courting media-babe medic with his priorities all askew. The harried prof, so busy writing grants to make sure his empire doesn't lag behind his American collaborators that he doesn't know what's going on in his own coldroom. The eager postdoc, hoarding scant praise. The pretty young PhD student sharing a toast to Barbara McClintock with the embittered, scintillating lecturer she could one day become....The Trust says it is "very pleased" with these plays. And so it should be.

Sara Abdulla is the senior science writer on the Nature News Service.