‘As good as playing to a packed theatre’: the actors who perform for stroke survivors

In 2000, the theatre director Caroline Smith nursed her brother through a terminal illness and, in the process, discovered that reading to him was a great source of stimulation. She promptly set up a charity that takes professional actors into hospitals to read poetry and stories to stroke survivors. Nearly a quarter of a century later InterAct Stroke Support operates all over the UK: a year ago, it made its first foray into Northern Ireland where Ciarán Hinds led a day of meeting patients at Belfast’s Whiteabbey hospital.

My own interest in InterAct was piqued by several things: living near to Caroline and her actor-husband, Christopher Ravenscroft; attending the charity’s recent short-story competition judged by Margaret Drabble; and having a natural curiosity about the multiple things actors do when they are not on stage or screen. So when I was invited to watch InterAct at work on a baking hot afternoon at the Charing Cross hospital in London I leapt at the chance.

I was met by Emma D’Inverno, a Scottish actor who has appeared in numerous TV series such as Doctor Who, Taggart and Rebus and whom I last saw on stage in a James Bridie play at London’s Finborough theatre . She has been with InterAct since the start, is currently its training coordinator and filled me in on the basic facts.

InterAct, she told me, “currently has 127 actors on the books who work in 20 hospitals and 32 stroke clubs all over the country. Although the actors do it for love, we pay them £35 for a two-hour session. The way it works is that the hospital staff draw up a list of patients who need help and the actors engage with them one-to-one. This requires training so a new recruit will shadow an actor for at least two sessions. We also give the actors a reading manual which classifies stories and poems under a variety of headings: a typical sample includes Animal Stories, Crime, Food, Songs and Sport. After each session, the reader will also note how it has gone in a folder so we have a record of the patient’s progress. But we depend totally on private funding. For example, I recently wrote to a Scottish firm, Tunnock’s Teacakes, who generously gave us £10,000 which funded a whole year’s work in Glasgow.”

I went to a stroke ward where Barbara Wilshere, who administers a core team of eight actors at Charing Cross, was reading to a patient. Like many actors, Barbara has appeared in a host of hospital series such as Casualty, Doctors and Peak Practice, so knows how to play a medico but I was struck by her ability to connect with a patient. As I arrived, she was reading a poem about the environment from a book by Brian Bilston. One line, in particular, struck me: “They can’t chop the rainforest down fast enough to keep up the supply of cheeseburgers.” The patient, with a professed love of poetry, quietly nodded her agreement.

But the reader, I realised, has to adjust quickly to circumstance. The second patient was undergoing nil-by-mouth treatment and was unable to communicate except by occasional nods of the head. Barbara knew that she was religious and quietly sang to her three Anglican hymns: The Lord Is My Shepherd, How Great Thou Art and Morning Has Broken. It was deeply moving to see the patient responding with the slightest of gestures and widening of the eyes to the words and music. Barbara told me that she herself is not particularly religious but understands the power of hymns and when I commented on her ability to adapt, she said: “That’s what we do as actors all the time.” As if to confirm that, her third encounter was with a middle-aged man to whom she performed, with great vivacity, one of Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes because she knew the patient was a fan of TV’s Tales of the Unexpected.

Later Barbara told me that you occasionally meet patient resistance. Once she was visiting a ward where the patient was telling everyone, herself included, to “fuck off”: only by discovering the patient was Irish and singing to her Danny Boy, Molly Malone and Galway Bay, did she manage to capture her attention before being gratefully told to eff off. Both Barbara and Emma acknowledge there is a disproportionate number of women among the actors involved. They also realise that the experience cuts two ways and benefits the actor as well as the patient. “It gives me greater confidence,” says Barbara, and “it’s as good as playing to a packed theatre,” say Emma.

After one afternoon, I was left admiring the skill and dedication of these actor-readers and the palpable good they do. Lucy Briers, an ambassador for InterAct, puts it eloquently when she tells me that reading to a patient is “like shining a torch into the human brain”.