Care review – this searing portrayal of dementia raises urgent questions for us all

Young Vic, LondonAlexander Zeldin’s devastating play depicts the gruelling loneliness and confusion of life in a care home Alexander Zeldin’s characters often inhabit the margins, from zero-hours workers to apparently unremarkable wives and mothers. Here is another community of the socially invisible presented by the writer-director: a cohort of elderly people in a care home. Set in what seems like a locked dementia ward, this play is both an unwavering portrait of what it means to be old, and an indictment of a system that leads to such acute loneliness in this last leg of life. In the book Being Mortal, the writer-surgeon Atul Gawande asks: “Why, as you become older and sicker, should you give up your autonomy?” Zeldin explores this from the point of view of Joan (Linda Bassett, moving beyond measure), who thinks she has been admitted on a temporary basis. The opening scene shows her disorientation before her put-upon daughter Lynn (Rosie Cavaliero) comes to visit. Lynn’s emotions are hard to access (part of the character or Cavaliero’s sometimes flat performance?) but her sons, both astonishingly portrayed (William Lawlor and Ethan Mahony on press night), blaze with