Michael Sheen’s Nye: Doctor turns performer for NHS play

Dr Otung is not new to acting.

“I’d done a few acting lessons as a child, but we couldn’t really afford them and so I had to stop,” she said.

“I remember just begging my mum if I could do them again, but it just wasn’t a possibility and so I kind of put that to the side, really.”

Then when she went to Birmingham University to study medicine, she began performing in the university’s musical theatre productions, juggling it around her lectures and exams.

She said while working as a doctor at Cardiff’s University Hospital Llandough through the Covid pandemic, an experience she described as crazy and intense, she realised she did not want to turn her back on performing.

Her realisation began when she took part in Gareth Malone’s TV programme The Choir: Singing for Britain, and found the experience therapeutic.

But it was something the then-prime minister Boris Johnson said that made her mind up.

“He said they were going to stop all the non-essentials, which included the arts, and I thought ‘the arts are absolutely essential, they’ve been keeping me going through this whole thing’ and that was when I knew I wanted to do some acting lessons and see where it goes,” she added.