CARE
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...
