Heartsink

Last week, I attended one of the first performances of a new play, ‘Heartsink’ by Farine Clark, a former GP who has faced her own struggles with illness. It tells the story of Dr Jeffrey Longford, a well-liked and respected GP nearing retirement who suddenly discovers he has a terminal cancer diagnosis. In a series of dialogues with his GP partner, Dr Roofi, the receptionist at the oncology clinic, and (most memorably) with the eponymous patient, whose regular Thursday appointments (with accompanying cake for the doctor) seem to typify the worried well.

At one level, this is an entertaining and funny look at what bad patients health professionals often make (ask my family!). It is also a rich exploration of what it means to still be a person when you have a diagnosis as a label.

But the play soon goes to a darker place, as Jeffrey starts to consider going to Dignitas to get all over with before he becomes a burden to his family (who he has not informed of his diagnosis). Each of the other characters challenges him on this for different reasons, and in the process, the play explores fear (of death, suffering, and above all, of being a burden to loved ones), hope in an afterlife, and unbearable grief. Indeed, the most affecting of these dialogues explores a profound grief that very recently led to a real-life assisted suicide in Switzerland.

Clark does a great job of exploring these and other issues with humour and sensitivity. She admitted to me before the performance, and to the audience during the Q&A I was invited to join in with afterwards, that she was still not sure where she stood in relation to assisted suicide legislation. She had sympathy for the pro-assisted suicide position out of compassion for those facing a terminal diagnosis, but feared the unintended consequences of such a massive legal change. And the play certainly does not come to a simple conclusion in either direction, instead leaving the audience to ask many questions about what they believed and why.

We are at an interesting juncture, with the Leadbeater and McArthur bills both failing in the Westminster and Holyrood parliaments within the last month. A conversation is being had, but is it a proper public one? Very often, the discussion is driven by misinformation and emotivism rather than a proper, informed debate that looks at all the issues. A recent poll suggests that as many as 40 per cent of the UK population do not know what ‘assisted dying’ actually means – with many thinking it is about legalising the withdrawal of treatment rather than prescribing lethal drugs for self-administration. To say there is a clear public mandate for such a change in the law is clearly fallacious. After the Q&A last Wednesday, I suspect this conversation is only just beginning. Art can be a good way of exploring the issue, and I hope that Clark’s enjoyable and thoughtful play might be part of stimulating better and more informed conversations about assisted suicide and end-of-life care. Because, in my experience, the more people explore the issues, the less attractive an ‘assisted death’ actually becomes to them.