The Heart - The Musical

The Heart follows one organ across a single day. A young surfer dies suddenly, a stranger who has been waiting is told there is a match, and two families who will never meet are pulled into the same hours by the same beating heart.

The musical moves between the two households and the medical team working between them, giving equal weight to grief and to the practical, unsentimental business of transplantation. Nobody here is a villain and nobody gets to choose, which is what makes the piece difficult: consent has to be asked for at the worst possible moment, and the machinery of medicine keeps moving whether or not anyone is ready for it.

Kait Kerrigan wrote the book, with music and lyrics by Anne Eisendrath and Ian Eisendrath, adapting Maylis de Kerangal's 2014 novel. It suits audiences who want a new musical that takes a serious subject at face value rather than softening it, and it works best live, where a company singing across a hospital corridor puts two families in the same room in a way that prose cannot.