‘a moving and painfully relatable portrayal of a common and yet almost invisible form of labour’
Anyone who has fallen down the rabbit hole of any healthcare system can sympathise with the central concept of this new play from Brussels-based company Broken Chair Productions, a directorial debut for playwright Shannon Damery. A young man suffering from a series of ailments, all as inexplicable as they are painful and crippling, is confined to a hospital room with only the fleeting presence of hospital staff, an eccentric social worker and his loving, boundary-crossing sister to keep him company. Full of staging and lighting ideas pulled from Alice in Wonderland and musical theatre, the piece mostly succeeds in combining zany, light-hearted worldbuilding with dark, unfortunately timely themes.
Much of this is owed to the ways it chooses restraint: whereas the environment, and indeed larger social circumstances of the play are drawn in quirky, broadly satirical strokes, Damery clearly understands that the central relationship between her two main characters must remain almost mundanely realistic. The pair, played by Neale McDonald and Sophie McQuillian, are very believable as a brother and sister/patient and carer duo, as she spends most her time micro-managing him and everyone else, and he mostly responds with frustrated, vitriolic protests. A lesser play might have sought to unpack and dissect these dynamics in ways that real-life people never do. Here, we are given the space to simply recognise them as true, and to infer all the things that are never said out loud – such the deep, completely unspeakable gratitude a patient feels towards the person who cares enough to fight with him.
The text is far more explicit – and a little preachy – when tackling the true burdens of the sister’s life, namely arrogant doctors, a bureaucratic social system that only seems to give her more work and, most of all, predatory insurance companies. These elements are given the Alice in Wonderland treatment in order to portray how removed the protagonists feel from the unintelligible and profoundly unfair systems that govern them. Although this is mostly conveyed successfully, taken by themselves, these elements are at times either too eccentric or not eccentric enough to really work. Some more conviction in ingraining the zany style into the actual action of the play rather than relying on stage directions alone might go a long way towards bringing these Terry Gilliam-esque ambitions to full fruition.
That said, Code Tea Party is a moving and painfully relatable portrayal of a common and yet almost invisible form of labour. It will have its last showing at the Courtyard Theatre on 25 October at 4pm.
Reviewer: Natalie Morris
Review Date: 23rd October 2026
Star Rating: THREE