The Dead Husband and the Missing Cat

It's a funny thing, roleplay. I know it's not real and the person doing the roleplay with me knows it's not real and the observers watching know it's not real.

But my job is, of course, to make it as real as possible.

A lot of the roleplay that I do for the training and assessment of healthcare professionals has a strong emotional content and I suppose that's one reason why they keep asking me to play these roles. I am, as they say, "in touch with my emotions" - I laugh a lot and I also cry quite easily, and can summon both those emotions where appropriate for a role.

Recently I was playing a woman whose husband had died suddenly, in an accident, eight months ago. The woman I was playing was very grief-stricken and I tried to show her grief to give the healthcare professional a good challenge.

Then I added on the next bit of the brief, which was that the woman's cat, her husband's favourite, her companion and her last link to her husband, had gone missing a month ago, which was the last straw.

I knew that there was strong comic potential in there so I had to do it as well as possible. For some reason "My husband's dead and now my cat's gone missing too" is likely, if done as bluntly as that, to get a laugh, which wasn't the effect I was wanting. It definitely ran the risk of becoming Comedy Bathos.

So I tried to do it as sensitively as I could and really feel the feelings and show how worried this woman was that her cat might be starving to death, trapped in a garage or shed somewhere.

After the roleplay had finished, and we'd done some feedback and I'd come out of role, all the watching students said "You made us cry!"

"Yes," said the tutor, "and I noticed when you cried. It wasn't at the death of her poor husband, was it? Oh no. It was the missing cat. That's when you all cried."

Ah yes. We Brits are a nation of animal-lovers, all right.