Review: Young Vic's "Care" Depicts Unflinching Reality of Care Home Life

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Alexander Zeldin's play about life in a residential care home has its world premiere

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Rosanna Vize ’s set for the world premiere of Care is sterile, harshly lit and unromantic. Like Alexander Zeldin ’s script, it is almost mundane in its naturalism, yet unflinching in how it approaches its subject: life in a care home, both for the elderly residents and for those who care for them.

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At the heart of this play, also directed by Zeldin, is a keen sense of how older people experiencing cognitive decline behave, and what that might illuminate about their subconscious. Every conversation between the care home’s residents is filled with non-sequiturs (“I went on a camping trip… it was pleasant”), but also with moments of startling clarity.

Just one throwaway line, or even one pointed look, betrays an entire universe of nostalgia and trauma living in the mind of someone who can no longer fully express it. When one older man ( Richard Durden ) decides to strip to his underwear and embrace a fellow resident, he says he does it because he “has no shame” – there is a constant sense here of something unsaid waiting to be revealed.

Much like in Zeldin’s socially conscious earlier works LOVE and Faith, Hope and Charity , there is also much dignity here granted to the understaffed care home’s two workers, played by Llewella Gideon and Aoife Gaston. There is compassion here for those on both sides of the healthcare equation; we feel for the nurses, leading their charges in a sing-along and keeping up an unbreakably kind facade, but we also feel the residents’ fear when the lights suddenly flicker off (the lighting, by James Farncombe , is punchy and emotionally disruptive).

With all this context established, Zeldin is free to zone in on one resident, a woman named Joan ( Linda Bassett ). After a series of falls, Joan has been taken from her own home, to that of her daughter Lynn (Rosie Cavaliero), and finally to residential care, and a sense of stubborn pride prevents her from fully accepting her new reality. Bassett is heartwrenchingly subtle in playing a woman on the brink of losing her memory and ability to live independently, yet still aware of herself enough to feel the life she wants slipping away from her.

This is the third in a loose trilogy of complex family portraits – with The Confessions and The Other Place – and like those plays, Care is concerned with how families splinter under the weight of bereavement. Lynn is accompanied on her visits to the care home by her two teenage sons ( William Lawlor and a dual role shared by Ethan Mahony and Charlie Webb ), who grow restless amid what they call “the dregs of death”, following their father’s accidental passing a year before. This subplot is not as poetically rendered as the scenes involving the elderly residents, but it’s still a reminder of how grief sends ripples long after the fact.

With a runtime of over two hours without an interval, Care does feel bloated when it slips too far into melodrama. A device wherein a resident goes to sit in the audience after dying, as though finally able to step away from the microscope and live on their own terms, is poignant but overplayed. A minor comic relief character, a lonely former sex worker called Simone ( Hayley Carmichael ), somehow gets an entire deathbed monologue, which draws focus from Joan and makes our protagonist’s own approach to death look rather drawn out and passive in comparison.

Still, Care is a great theatrical achievement just for its attempts to plumb the subconscious of the elderly, rather than treating them merely as objects of sympathy. There is nothing saccharine here, but instead a dignified portrait of old age in all its complexities.

Care plays at the Young Vic until 11 July

Photo credits: Johan Persson

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/westend/article/Review-CARE-Young-Vic-20260519)._