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Book an appointment for the world premiere of Heartsink, a bittersweet medical comedy by former GP Farine Clarke, starring Kathy Kiera Clarke (Derry Girls) as Cara.
Playing a strictly limited run at Riverside Studios, book your official tickets to Heartsink today.
Heartsink is a darkly funny, tender comedy about what happens when the doctor becomes the patient.
When GP Dr Jeffrey Longford is diagnosed with cancer, he’s thrust from the certainty of the consulting room into the fear and vulnerability of the waiting room. Stripped of status and control, his once-solid beliefs - about medicine, dignity, and assisted dying - begin to fracture.
As Jeffrey navigates life on the wrong side of the stethoscope, he’s surrounded by characters who are never quite what they seem: an Irish patient hiding a dangerous secret behind hypochondria and magical cake; a sharp-tongued hospital receptionist with a philosopher’s mind; and a gentle colleague forced to confront both professional duty and moral unease.
With gallows humour, compassion, and bite, Heartsink collides two intertwined worlds, doctor and patient, to reveal how differently they feel when lived from the inside.
**A post-show Q&A **with the cast and creatives will take place on Wednesday 22 April, the event is included in the price of your ticket.
Best known to millions around the world as Aunt Sarah in the hit TV show Derry Girls, Northern Irish actress Kathy Kiera Clarke was already well established as a stage actor when she found fame in Lisa McGee’s much-loved comedy. I saw her as Grace in Brian Friel’s mighty Faith Healer at Bristol Old Vic giving a mesmerising performance in a mesmerising play. She has played Lady Macbeth and Medea and was in the Royal Court premiere of Conor McPherson’s Shining City. She is definitely no slouch.
This week she can be found at Riverside in a new play, Heartsink, in which she plays Cara, one of those patients who haunt GP’s surgeries and who used to be known by GPs as “heartsink” patients, a disused term describing those who, every time they step through the door, cause the doctor’s heart to sink because they take up a disproportionate amount of time.
But as Dr Jeffrey Longford (played by Aden Gillett) discovers, there is much more to Cara than it first appears. “What I’m bringing to the table,” says the writer, former GP Farine Clarke, “is my own experience of being a doctor, although it was a very long time ago, and my interest in looking at what happens when the doctor suddenly finds himself in the position of being a patient.” It is something that she herself knows because a few years ago she had a kidney transplant. Heartsink is by no means autobiographical, but she does say that it was having the transplant which made her realise she had to seize the day and invest in becoming a full-time playwright.
Heartsink is a comedy but one which encompasses grief which is manifest in many different ways, and Kathy Kiera Clarke says that she knew she was going to do the play as soon as she read it, not least because she has been dealing with her own grief: her mother died just over a year ago.
“Grief changes you,” says Clarke, “and after the initial wretched grief that you think will never ever shift, it can move into something more nourishing.” She says that there was one particular speech Cara has in the play which spoke directly to her because as “you navigate grief; it changes your relationship to religion or spirituality, and you learn to live your life in a different way."
Which Clarke herself has had to do since the end of the final series of Derry Girls, pointing out that there are many kinds of grief and letting go of character like Sarah can be tricky.
15 Apr, 2026 | By Lyn Gardner
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