An evening in A&E might not be most people’s idea of a good night out, but in Care, the new aerial theatre production from Tangled Feet and Watford Palace Theatre, it’s going to be a hospital visit with a difference.

Over-worked doctors stitch people together, patients grasp at the uncertainty of their future, and cleaners try to wash all the politics away. Through it all are the caring, comic and continuous efforts of the workforce that keep it all running. As the future of the publicly funded National Health Service hangs in the balance, how do we keep it going? How do we place a value on one of our country’s greatest achievements?

In Care, part of this year’s Imagine Watford and The Big Festival, doctors fly and nurses dance in the theatre’s auditorium, which has been transformed into a hospital waiting room and operating theatre. The action takes place both on the ground and up in the air over the audience, the latter as a physical representation of the future of the NHS being up in the air and things getting harder.

Care tells the story of hospital cleaner Rita, who catches a virus and is admitted to the hospital she works in, and examines the care she gets from the staff there.

“Her character, and her body, represent the NHS,” explains Nathan Curry, co-director of both Tangled Feet and this production, “and as she becomes more poorly, it changes from being about her to being about the whole system.”

While the play is not overtly political, Nathan says it’s almost impossible to make a play about the NHS without bringing politics into it.

“There’s loads of focus on the NHS, it’s in the news every day, it was a huge election issue,” says Nathan, 34, who founded Tangled Feet with a group of friends from Middlesex University in 2004, “but to the people working in the hospitals all that matters to them is the patient in front of them. Of course, they can’t help but be affected by it – if there’s a new target for waiting times or some kind of restructuring – but the idea of someone coming in needing help, that remains the same no matter what happens.

“It’s like politics is the storm all around them, the hurricane, and they’re inside just getting on with it.”

Nathan and the Tangled Feet team visited a number of hospitals while they were putting the play together, including spending some time in the outpatients and psychotherapy departments and on the wards at Watford General Hospital, checking terminology and procedures and, most importantly, “putting a face to all the media stories” and learning exactly what day-to-day life is like for staff.

Care purposely doesn’t take any particular political stance and doesn’t try to sway the audience – there are characters who represent the argument for more privatisation and those who are for keeping money out of the NHS – and it doesn’t offer any answers to the question of what the future holds for the service.

“There’s not one simple answer, no quick fix,” continues Nathan. “The whole system is straining and it’s not going to just go away. It’s not the same system that was set up nearly 70 years ago, we’re not the same population as before. It’s becoming untenable. Something has to change.”

While Care doesn’t offer a prognosis for the future of the NHS, it aims to give the audience space to think about how they rate our healthcare system and the value placed on care.

“Often, you don’t stop and think about it until you’re lying in a hospital bed,” says Nathan. “We give the audience the chance to think about how they value it and what it costs.

“It’s going to be a question that returns to us again and again because we’re all going to depend on the NHS at some point.”