Theatre review: CARE

Alexander Zeldin's CARE takes place in a care home for the elderly, which Rosanna Vize's set design and James Farncombe's lighting bring to clinically realistic life, but with the odd flicker into something a bit eerier befitting a liminal space between life and death. Joan (Linda Bassett) arrives there after a fall damages her hip, believing that she'll be there for a few days at most until the physical injury recovers. But her daughter Lynn (Rosie Cavaliero) is already looking into making this a more permanent solution, as the accident was in part due to Joan's failing mental health, and the family can no longer trust that she won't be a danger to herself. As she spends her first few weeks in the home, an increasingly confused Joan does find some moments of joy as the residents share their life stories and highlights.

She also makes an unexpected friend in the home's resident troublemaker Simone (Hayley Carmichael,) whose dark sexual past reveals itself in her gleefully trolling the old ladies with graphic language, and a sad, quasi-romance with John (Transphobia Ltd Employee Richard Durden,) even though she knows he mistakes her for his late wife.

The playwright has translated and adapted this from his own earlier play that premiered in French under the title Une Mort Dans La Famille, and it's easy to assume this is about where Joan's story is going to end up. But it could also be about a death in the family a couple of years earlier when Lynn was widowed, and she and her teenage sons Laurie (William Lawlor) and Robbie (Charlie Webb, alternating with Ethan Mahony) are still struggling to process it.

This means that as Lynn's promises to visit daily become weekly then monthly and longer, she variously looks like victim or villain depending on the scene and the circumstances, and this is a central feature of a show which aims above all to look at its situation and characters from a point of impartiality.

Even its commentary on the care system's lack of funds comes down to a dispassionate mention of having to save on cleaning wipes and the occasional ominous flickering of the electrics. Llewella Gideon's head nurse Hazel doesn't get any big dramatic speeches but she does get to reveal that under her impatience with the residents and her trainee Fanta (Aoife Gaston) is a very tired woman who just wants to look after people.

Needless to say this isn't the easiest of watches at times, and the production's conceit that every time a resident dies their actor joins the audience gets used so many times it can be employed for a final twist. Also a show about octogenarians that runs well over two hours without a pee break could definitely be said to be dicing with danger. But it's as funny as it is sad, which makes it not as bleak as its subject matter might suggest. Although the two women sitting behind me cackling "ooh, that'll be us in thirty years' time!" probably needn't worry: If they keep talking that much in the theatre they're bound to be murdered long before that. (The woman next to me's head almost went full Exorcist turning to shush them.)

CARE by Alexander Zeldin is booking until the 11th of July at the Young Vic.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.