WE started 2024 with the screening of Mr Bates vs The Post Office, and over four nights more than ten million television viewers were caught up in the story of Horizon, Paula Vennells and the hundreds of postmistresses and postmasters whose lives they ruined. It really was a historic piece of television, and one that finally forced both the Post Office and the Government to face up to the facts.

It had the highest profile among the growing body of docu-dramas that seek to inform and redress – perhaps the message is that the only way we open our eyes and ears these days if it’s on TV or on stage?

The latest play to take the campaign route is Laughing Boy, based on a book by academic Sara Ryan about her son Connor, adapted for the stage by Stephen Unwin and now at Bath Theatre Royal until 8th June after its premiere at London’s Jermyn Street Theatre. It is the true story about a young man with complex learning difficulties who fell victim to the multi-purpose excuses for inattentive care of the vulnerable within the NHS and its wider ambit.

Performed on a blank semi-circular stage, with only chairs for props and a range of video projections, five actors play a variety of roles with two, Alfie Friedman as Connor Sparrowhawk, and Janie Dee as his mother Sara Ryan, in the central roles.

Following a non-chronological time frame, Connor’s story is unfolded, pre and post mortem, from his childhood through the eventual inquest after his death while taking an unsupervised bath in a special NHS unit. The frustrations of callously ridiculous “explanations” and petty-fogging bureaucracy are balanced against the love and laughter that surrounded Connor’s early years. Sara’s increasingly exasperated blog – her only opportunity to make her feelings known and to tell the wider world about how every attempt to find out what had happened to her son was being obfuscated and scuppered – further infuriated the defensive NHS brotherhood.

Eventually, more than a decade after Connor’s preventable death, the hospital trust was called to account, but the campaign continues so that the same or very similar inactions cannot lead to other preventable deaths.

This play is a heart-wrenching, compelling call to arms. How many more will we be seeing in future months and years, trying to unravel the systematic degradation and disintegration of the services on which we have a right to depend.

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Photographs by Alex Brenner