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BARRA FITZGIBBON REMEMBERS the moment doctors told him to call his family.
It was March 2020, and Covid had left him critically ill in a London hospital. Before placing him in a medically induced coma, a consultant suggested he speak to his wife and children in case he didn’t wake up.
“He said, ‘You might want to ring home,’” Fitzgibbon recalled.
“You knew what that meant. You’re trying to say goodbye without actually saying the words.”
Fitzgibbon did wake up, just days after the call. Years later, he has turned the story of those weeks in intensive care into a theatre production.
Now, on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the first nationwide lockdown in Ireland (12 March 2020), he’s preparing to bring the story home.
The play, titled Patient: Soldier, draws on the Dubliner’s experience in a hospital in the London borough of Lewisham during the chaotic early weeks of the pandemic, when wards were filling rapidly and doctors were still learning how to treat the virus.
The story is partially told through an unusual narrator: the Grim Reaper.
The idea came from the strange period when Fitzgibbon was emerging from the coma.
“You get these extraordinary hallucinations when they’re bringing you back,” he said.
I kept seeing the Grim Reaper sitting at the end of the bed. In my head we were having full conversations.
That image eventually became the device that carries the play.
“I thought afterwards, that’s actually the story,” Fitzgibbon said.
“Death sitting there waiting, and the argument about whether I was going with him or not.”
When Fitzgibbon first arrived at University Hospital Lewisham, Covid was spreading rapidly across Britain and intensive care units were under growing pressure.
His condition deteriorated soon after admission. Doctors told him the infection had triggered pneumonia, sepsis and complications affecting his liver.
“They were very straight with me,” he said.
“One of the consultants said, ‘You’re extremely sick.’”
The decision was made to place him in a medically induced coma. At the time, doctors estimated he had about a 60% chance of survival.
“You hear numbers like that and it’s surreal,” Fitzgibbon said.
“You’re lying there thinking, is that good odds or bad odds?”
When he regained consciousness days later, several consultants were gathered around the bed.
“They were all smiling,” he said. “I thought, that can’t be a bad sign.”
The doctors explained that he had become the first patient in an ICU ward in the UK to wake from a medically-induced coma as a result of Covid.
Nurses had also given him a nickname.
“They never called me Barra,” he explained. “They called me Soldier.”
The name stuck for the rest of his stay.
“It was just kind of a tongue in cheek nickname. This one guy’s made it, so let’s call him soldier.”
Because doctors were still unsure how infectious recovering patients might be, Fitzgibbon remained in intensive care longer than would normaly be expected.
That gave him a strange vantage point.
“I was sitting up in the bed watching everything happening around me,” Fitzgibbon said.
“You could see the pressure they were under.”
The ward changed quickly during those early weeks of the pandemic.
“When I arrived there were maybe twenty patients.”
Within days it felt like the place was overflowing.
Staff in Lewisham Hospital struggled to keep pace.
“In ICU normally it’s one nurse to one patient, suddenly some of them were looking after two or three,” Fitzgibbon said.
Doctors were also making decisions with limited information about how best to treat the virus.
“They were ringing colleagues abroad,” he said. “Consultants in China, consultants in Italy. They’d be saying, ‘What are you doing with patients like this?’”
Guidance seemed to shift from day to day.
“You could tell they were figuring it out in real time.”
Not every memory from the ward is grim, however.
One nurse repeatedly tripped over the cables running from Fitzgibbon’s bed to the monitoring equipment.
“He kept catching his foot in the wires,” Fitzgibbon said.
“At one point I said, ‘You’re going to pull the whole system out.’”
Even in an intensive care unit, moments of humour broke through.
“There were days when people were dying around the place, but you’d still hear someone cracking a joke,” he explained.
That mixture of tension and dark humour eventually made its way into the script.
“Humanity doesn’t stop just because disaster arrives,” Fitzgibbon said.
Fitzgibbon did not originally plan to turn the experience into theatre.
During his recovery he began writing short blog reflections about the hospital stay.
“I just wanted to get it out of my head,” he said. “There were things I’d seen that stayed with me.”
Friends encouraged him to keep going.
Playwright Katherine White later adapted those writings into a stage script and took on the role of narrator in the production.
In the one-woman/one-man play (actor Michael Mahony also occasionally takes on the role), she also appears as the Grim Reaper, guiding the audience through the events of March 2020.
“When people walk into the theatre, the Reaper is already there,” Fitzgibbon explained.
“Just sitting, waiting.”
At one point, a voice asks the Reaper a question: have you ever lost?
“Yes,” the Reaper replies. “Once.”
“That line gets a laugh,” Fitzgibbon said, “but there’s a sting in it as well.”
For Fitzgibbon, the play is ultimately about the staff who treated him during the pandemic’s first wave.
“I saw what they were dealing with every day,” he said.
“Most of them were in their twenties and they were carrying this enormous weight.”
Across England and Wales, more than 850 health and social care workers died due to Covid during the first two years of the pandemic.
“I’ve never seen anything like what they did,” Fitzgibbon said.
They walked into that ward every morning not knowing what was coming.
Years later, he still thinks about those days whenever he passes Lewisham Hospital.
“You don’t forget a place where you nearly died,” he said.
What stays with him most is how close the outcome came to being different.
“It’s a strange thing,” he explained.
“You go from that moment where they tell you to call your family… to sitting in a theatre watching your story on stage.”
The Killiney native added that there is a “coming home aspect” to the play showing across Ireland.
He added that Irish audiences are “much more attuned to the humour” of the play.
Above all else, Fitzgibbon just wants people to enjoy the production, which he says will give people “a space to reflect” on the pandemic that impacted us all.
“The play is immersive, I think it’s theater at its best. People will walk out with skip in their step, a smile on their face,” he said.
“It’ll leave you thinking: isn’t it good to be alive?”
Patient:Soldier is touring a number of venues across the country in April and May 2026, including the Civic Theatre (Tallaght), Draíocht Theatre (Blanchardstown), Watergate Theatre (Kilkenny), St John’s Theatre (Listowel), Cork Arts Theatre (Cork City) and Mermaid Arts Centre (Bray).
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