The Tuesday Group: ethics in performance

For three nights during this year’s Brighton Festival a small theatre above a typically quirky North Laines shop became the venue for a play entitled The Tuesday Group. Written by Sue Eckstein, the play was directed and performed by Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) students. With minimal staging and simple costumes these young people managed to transform themselves into a group of people of varying ages brought together because they were each facing the end of their life.

The Tuesday Group was originally written as part of a European Commission funded project headed up by Bobbie Farsides, BSMS’s Professor of Clinical and Biomedical Ethics. She commissioned Sue to write a play based upon the notes that had been taken during patient support group meetings at a well-known London hospice. The notes covered a period of ten years, during which time a succession of patients came together once a week to share a cup of tea and a safe place to voice their thoughts and share their experiences of living with a terminal diagnosis. Inevitably the groups’ membership would shift over time, with people becoming too ill to attend and eventually dying. Even within the five weeks covered by the play we see the way in which people can come together and form meaningful bonds, only to then face the reality of loss.

An experienced playwright and novelist, Sue nonetheless found this project particularly challenging, and says that she initially underestimated how long it would take to transform the notes into a credible drama. Because of the need to stay true to what people had actually spoken about and how they had behaved and interacted – as revealed by the social worker whose job it was to record the meeting – Sue was denied easy recourse to standard dramatic devices. She also needed to quash some of the expectations her audience might have had that were not borne out in the notes – for example, very sick people spend very little time discussing their symptoms and medication, possibly that is more a trait of the worried well. Perhaps the biggest surprise for audiences has been the amount of humour found in these encounters.

The Tuesday Group was only one of the events in the BSMS Ethic’s team’s new series entitled Ethics in Performance. Brighton is an exceptional city in terms of its artistic life and BSMS has always sought to tap into this, particularly given the commitment to educate well-rounded doctors with an holistic approach to medicine and health care. By inviting poets, graphic artists, playwrights, actors, filmmakers and historians into the medical school, students have been challenged and their education has been enriched.

More importantly, by making these open events and ensuring that they take place outside normal working hours, new audiences have become aware of BSMS’s contribution to the culture of the city. As the Ethics in Performance mailing list grows, our community gains an insight into the broadening scope of modern medical education whilst at the same time being entertained and enriched by high quality performance and art.

Bobbie Farsides, Professor of Clinical and Biomedical Ethics

Sue Eckstein, Lecturer in Clinical and Biomedical Ethics

Detailed information on all past and forthcoming Ethics in Performance events can be found at http://www.bsms.ac.uk/research/our-research/medical-ethics/ethics-in-performance/