Care – stylised as CARE – is acclaimed writer-director Alexander Zeldin getting back to his roots. Kind of. After the cartoonishly overwrought stab at Greek tragedy that was The Other Place, his newest is a naturalistic yarn about an English retirement home, that harks back to his breakthrough Inequalities trilogy of plays about the fraying social contract in austerity Britain.
It’s not quite the same, though, because while contemporary stresses on the British care system are alluded to, they’re not really the point here. Despite an aesthetic that teeters on kitchen sink, Zeldin is one of the few Brit directors whose career has really taken off in Europe, and Care in fact began life in France. It’s been reworked, but it’s ultimately a play about a more universal care home experience.
That experience centres on Linda Bassett’s Joan, a grandmother who has been placed in the show’s unnamed home for what – as she sees it – is a couple of weeks to recuperate from a nasty fall. She has a family: a daughter, Lynn (Rosie Cavaliero) and two grandsons, Laurie (William Lawlor) and Robbie (shared by Charlie Webb and Ethan Mahony), but they’re clearly having a tough time following the death of Lynn’s husband. So Joan is checking into a home for a bit. Or so she thinks.
It’s an extraordinary performance from Bassett. I don’t normally get too dewy-eyed about the emotional cost of acting, but it must surely be an unsettling thing to be an older actor when so much of the best work available is about dementia, death and other inevitabilities that you may be shortly facing yourself. Bassett is an absolute trooper, giving an utterly unflinching – and ultimately very brave – performance as a kindly grandmother being slowly hollowed out over the course of the play’s nebulous (but at least, months-long) time frame. It’s clearly not just a fall that’s afflicted her: her memory is starting to fade, and she gets confused and angry, berating Lynn for spending all her money on the care facility.
Ultimately it’s not a happy story: Zeldin is clear that people are put into homes to die and – to a certain extent – be forgotten about by their families. But it’s not without celebration of this world. When Joan arrives there’s an amusingly Mean Girls-like aspect to her getting to know the various eccentrics in residence. There’s a lovely group of secondary characters, from Richard Durden’s wispy, almost unearthly John to Hayley Carmichael’s Simone, whose inhibitions have clearly been impacted by dementia and who talks about sex constantly. Zeldin and casting director Jacob Sparrow have done a wonderful job of pulling together a largely octogenarian cast, with some of the smaller roles representing stage debuts.
There are the staff, too, with Llewella Gideon’s supervisor Hazel pulling 20-hour days to keep the show on the road. She’s not a superwoman, and the scenes where her younger colleague Fanta (Aoife Gaston) is leading the residents through nursery school-alike exercises are, in some ways, very depressing. But it is ultimately the case that Zeldin shows us that – at a decent home – good will and indeed, literal care are required to keep the show on the road.
The final component is Joan’s family. While the business with Lynn’s husband having died feels like it’s laying it on a bit thick, it’s a particularly poignant study in how the slipping away of a grandparent can affect children - older Laurie reacts with anger; younger Robbie with confused sadness.
It’s shamelessly emotionally manipulative in places, with a clanging last note. And compared to the Inequalities trilogy, it’s not totally clear what Zeldin is actually trying to say about the care system other than that ‘this is what it’s like’. Which is fair enough: it’s a world that little dramatic light gets thrown on – and with the brilliant Bassett as our proxy, it’s a powerfully unsparing guide to the end.
