Care for the elderly, whether in hospital, in a specialised residential setting or in a person’s own home, is one of our most pressing social issues. It is also complex, expensive and decidedly unsexy, which is why the topic is too often avoided, not least by the entertainment industry. Writer/director Alexander Zeldin is not one to shy away from such a subject, given that previous hard-hitting projects of his have covered homeless hostels and zero-hours contracts. Zeldin’s latest work means that the London stage now offers the magnificent Linda Bassett, lynchpin of Call the Midwife as Nurse Phyllis Crane, as an unwilling new arrival in a decidedly unglamorous care home. The piece, naturally, is called Care.
“God’s waiting room” is the phrase that my Mum always used to describe care homes and Care struck a deeply chiming chord with me, not least because I scattered her ashes just two weeks ago. I spent the utterly hellish last 51 weeks of Mum’s life trying to keep her out of a care home – I succeeded – and to ensure that she was able to die in her own home (I failed). During this year of horror, I visited her more than 80 times in four separate hospital settings for the elderly, one of them necessitating a two-and-a-half-hour round trip in the car. Thus I instantly recognised the desperate cheerfulness of Lynn (Rosie Cavaliero), daughter of Bassett’s Joan, as she tries to convince herself that her mother is going to be fine, that the costly but overstretched home is suitable, when she knows deep down that neither of these things is true.
