What I’m Here For review – high-pressure horror of a nurse’s shift from hell

The standard colour scheme for hospital dramas is clinical white. You expect gleaming walls and antiseptic surfaces, institutionally bright. Mai Katsume takes the opposite tack.

In this co-production between Vanishing Point from Glasgow and Teater Katapult from Aarhus, Denmark, the designer dresses nurses, doctors and patients in black and lines them up across an ominously dark stage.

Only one is in white: Lærke Schjærff Engelbrecht stands alone as Flora, a hard-pressed nurse working an extra weekend shift because of short staffing. Even the flickering strip lights on the floor she paces are entombed in black. They seem to suck the light away from her. Simon Wilkinson’s austere lighting design adds to the atmosphere of monochrome terror. The effect, in Matthew Lenton’s high-precision production, is to turn a stressful night on the wards into something like gothic horror.

The script, written by Josephine Eusebius and performed in a heady cocktail of Danish and English, goes where many ER dramas have gone before. There are too many patients and too few staff. Flora, empathetic by temperament and profession, cheerfully trots out the same welcoming lines about treating the hospital like a hotel, but she is left with cruel choices.

Should she tend to the pleasant woman with a brain tumour in room 22 (Aisha Goodman) or the demanding lady with a heart condition in room 33 (Charlotte Trier)? She can only do so much.

Eusebius is not the first to observe the tension between an overstretched system and an emotionally invested workforce but, intensified by Mark Melville’s soundtrack of pulses, throbs and drones, her story finds a dark psychological centre. As with so many of the characters in Lenton’s work, Flora is a woman who finds herself at odds with the people around her. She is both part of the medical team and distanced from it, a sense of alienation made physical by her isolation from the other actors and their disembodied commentary.

Downstage throughout, she talks to her colleagues in dreamlike exchanges until the weight of her decisions seems to draw them around her, their presence as oppressive as her life-and-death moral dilemmas.

• At the Tron, Glasgow, until 4 April. Touring until 18 April.