As protests go, it is no Tahrir Square but perhaps no less resolute. At the age of 83, Queenie Blair has had her fill of being nannied. She objects, in particular, to the care-home stipulation against unaccompanied smoking. The staff do not want her setting fire to herself. She prefers her liberty. So she claims what little control she has, sits on a bench and refuses to come indoors.
She spends much of Christina Castling’s play sitting there, out in the cold, fending off the various attempts to force, cajole and sweet-talk her back to her room. If it is not legal disclaimers and form-filling, it is hot-water bottles and fresh knickers.
Not a major act of civil disobedience, then, but characteristic of the play’s matter-of-fact portrait of life in a care home. Beyond Caring shows what should be the exceptional and the politically outrageous as it is seen from the ground up: the everyday business of a care worker’s life.
Drawing on interviews with relatives, residents and staff, Castling sets the play pointedly, but subtly, in February 2020, as the residents are coming down with a debilitating virus. At this stage, it is just another stress to add to a litany of shortcomings faced by an overstretched workforce who lack the time to take residents to the toilet, let alone sit down for a healthy chat.
Hanging in the air is the line from Amazing Grace about grace leading us home. After a lifetime of domestic familiarity, the residents find themselves permanently displaced. The heaven of the hymn sounds more promising. Are we too willing, the play asks, to farm out our elderly relatives to a place that is home in name only?
Yet its politics are not strident. Rather, this is a gentle meditation on love and loss, low-key but touching and humane. Fluidly segueing from scene to scene, it is more conversational than dramatic and sometimes loses focus as a result, but in Jonluke McKie’s production for Gala Durham and the Queen’s Hall, it is beautifully performed by Judi Earl, Jacqueline Phillips and Rosie Stancliffe, each of them precise, unsentimental and true.
