Medicine is often regarded as a vocation, but passion for curing the sick always eluded Matt Lane. As a child he performed in youth operas, school plays and choirs. For an academic all-rounder, medicine was an almost arbitrary choice. “I got my GCSE results and the science subjects were slightly better. So I thought, ‘I’ll do that’. I didn’t know what to do with my creative side.”

It was the start of a long road. Three science A levels later, he applied to Cambridge to study medicine, but didn’t get in. “It was obvious that I didn’t have a passion for it.” He eventually went to Bristol University. “I didn’t actually think: ‘I’m going to be there with patients dying in front of me’. It was part of my naivety.”

In the holidays he directed youth operas and played saxophone. Exams posed little difficulty, but when it came to clinical tests, he struggled. “Hospitals weren’t the caring places I had anticipated. I found the negativity [of] illness difficult.” On graduating, his first rotation was as a junior doctor on a ward for the elderly. After the dynamism of medical school, dealing with sedentary patients was scary. “I hated it. Within two months I knew that I didn’t want to do this for the rest of my life.” He walked patients around the wards to keep them entertained. “It was probably against everything in their notes but it was the best medicine I could think of.”

Living in the hospital and working long shifts was gruelling. “We’d often work from 9am on Saturday to 5pm on Monday, then do a full week.” At “crisis point”, he came up with a plan: qualify in emergency medicine, then go to drama school. He auditioned as a director for the Central School of Speech and Drama, and won a place – as an actor.

Drama school was “like being reborn,” he says. “As a medic you’re always hard at work and here people would sit around drinking coffee, talking about shades of colour.” Throughout he worked night shifts in a hospital to pay off debts and started a youth opera company. When acting didn’t pay off, he changed tack. “I needed to cut the ties with medicine completely.” He found a job in community regeneration that included running school music workshops and community operas. “I felt [that] I was making a difference. In medicine, I hadn’t.”

Three years later, the Royal Opera House advertised for someone to devise an educational programme using back-stage crafts at a new site in Thurrock, Essex. Community projects bring children, young offenders and housing estate residents together in the arts, including set design, carpentry and hat making. They stage operas alongside professionals. The work combines several passions for Lane. “It feels like directing. You have to know the processes of making a show.”

With hindsight comes clarity, he says. “Medicine enabled me to understand people on another level. I think there will come a point when I say: now I know what all of that was for.”

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