My review of CARE coming up just as soon as the doctor and nurse go have a little chat …

As a company who have become skilled in making theatre about specific communities, WillFredd have always felt true to their documentary sources while at the same time allowing for humour and playfulness of form. So when director Sophie Motley and designer Sarah Jane Shiels walked into the St Francis Hospice in Raheny over a year ago, you’d wonder if a performance about employees who care for patients in their final stages of illness could carry the same cheer?

From an opening scene where staff deal playing cards that in turn deal out placements for patients’ beds it seems that frolics are still in play. Tactless perhaps but it signals a sincere portrayal of palliative care and its mixing of medicine and mirth.

Blue curtains are stripped back to reveal nurses and doctors collecting the medical history of a new patient, Anne, represented by a mannequin gleaming under Sarah Jane Shiels’ pearlescent lighting.

It’s a fine line between light and dark, and Motley has a cast to tread it expertly. Eleanor Methven intelligently spells out medical diagnoses as a doctor and later she comically voices disdain at the mention of a hospice (“I’d rather iron my own legs!”). Similarly, Sonya Kelly’s undercutting wit eventually gives way to a gentle monologue describing the scene of a client’s last breath.

A combination of scenes reveal attitudes towards hospices as depressed and death-obsessed environments. However, when the staff rush to a patient’s request to hear an Elvis song, with Shane O’Reilly belting out the refrain “This time the girl is gonna stay” and the rest of the cast providing dazzling support, the truth appears to be that people work determinedly to raise patients’ spirits. Illness does not prevent the fulfilment of lives.

There are many tools on display. Composer Jack Cawley’s welling arrangements pace the production softly. O’Reilly’s physical vocabulary traces the steps of rehabilitation in a movement with musician Seán Mac Erlaine, whose wind instruments hum a low melody.

It’s where reality intrudes that WillFredd’s theatre is extraordinary, and in CARE the circumstances are particularly emotional. O’Reilly interrupts a scene by pounding furiously against the wall, creating a sense of the utter uncontrollable, of lives spinning out of control. And only Motley could so discreetly transform the clicking of a doctor’s pen into a fading heartbeat.

It all ends with a reversion to the ordinariness of the workplace, of a place that has to continue when lights are extinguished. But from WillFredd’s glowing production about decline we’ll remember that care is at hand, magnifying lives and their brimming inspiration, even when surrounded by shadows.

A game of poker. Some show tunes. Dismantled mannequins. Plasticince as dinner. These may not seem like the hallmarks of a show about hospices and palliative care, and you would be right. But WillFredd (FOLLOW, FARM) have succeeded once again in using a talented ensemble and their own ingenuity to create a show that is more about the audience than about the actors, more personal than political, and more about those left behind than those left to die.

WillFredd have followed up two successful years with a show that actively seeks to put life on the agenda. The premise is simple: in a hospice the staff go about their day to day work. They make tea and give baths, they pray and they clean, they sing and they dance. They show the audience that is no ‘normal’ day in the life of a hospice worker.

Like an impressionist painting the brushstrokes of brilliance are scattered over a white canvas. Up close they seem scattered and impulsive, but stepping back Sophie Motley’s superb direction creates a picture of a homely place, for staff and patients alike. In using a mannequin as the “patient” she allows the audience to place their own relatives on this faceless body. The musical interludes are uplifting, but self-aware and deprecating. More than anything, the depth and darkness of the humor is deeply profound. In a time when the Abbey is staging Sive in an effort to revive Irishness, WillFredd have discovered a truly Irish voice. This is evident in their discussion of a hospice as a place “for elderly Protestants” and the stark fact that “feeding [patients] up won’t make them better”.

Although Motley maintains an Irish sensibility and sense of humor, there is an awareness of the cruelty within the system they uphold. The opening lines of “How many beds? Two beds” and the game of poker that follows indicate just how much there is at stake during this performance. But also, just how much is at stake on a daily basis in a way that graphs and Irish Times reports never can.

In putting the patient at the center, they skew the focus in order to concentrate on the humanity of those around the them. But it’s not about death; it circles around a human staff that care for the patient, care about them, who care full stop. At first it establishes that the Occupational Therapist, Nurse et al. are defined only by their jobs, and then it shatters this illusion. The ensemble are restrained and animated in equal measure, bringing terrific energy and understanding to each role they play. Eleanor Methven is uncannily credible in her role as the doctor. But Shane O’Reilly gives a performance that spans the entire spectrum of acting ability, from an Elvis-like routine and right back to a considerate nurse.

Sarah Jane Shields’ set is equally drastic, jumping between the clinical white and blue that the audience is so familiar with, while adding splashes of colour with flashing lights. Working in tandem with the set, Sarah Bacon’s costumes are similarly divisive in relation to colour. Emma O’Kane’s choreography creates the most evocative moment of the entire show. Her duet between Shane O’Reilly and Seán Mac Erlaine is visually striking and literally carries the feeling behind the word “care” in every gesture.

In seeing the sheer humanity of the care team, WillFredd have depoliticised palliative care and brought it to an audience who are willing and ready to listen. And if that doesn’t convince you, then the lyrics “Love is a sexually transmitted disease with a 100% mortality rate” should do the trick.

The highly acclaimed WillFredd theatre company returns to Project Arts Centre with Care, a transformative piece about not just death, but also life in a hospice. After their first two award-winning productions, Follow and Farm, Sophie Motley and Sarah Jane Shiels’s group once again pushes the boundaries of contemporary Irish theatre scene with yet another ethically challenging play. However, as stated by Motley during the post-show discussion, their focus was never on any particular hospice patient; instead, the story is told from the staff’s point of view, so this show is really “about the people who add life to days if not days to life” (programme).

Working closely with the staff of St. Francis Hospice, WillFredd challenges the stereotypical notion of the hospice as a place where you go to die, embracing the idea that life can be valued especially in a place where you are surrounded by death. While Care is not a documentary, it is nonetheless forged by the company’s experience with “daily Hospice life,” (venue website blurb) including the fictional patient, Anne, created by a doctor at St. Francis to help WillFredd devise the show.

Anne (the only fictionally named character), played by a mannequin on whose surface or skin her medical history can be written, “is not real, but her story is close enough to being real to create a meaningful character” (programme note). Anne is at the centre of the story told by the great performing ensemble, which in WillFredd’s trademark style blends words and music, dance and movement. The cast, composed by stellar actors Eleanor Methven, Sonya Kelly and Shane O’Reilly, and great musician Seán Mac Erlaine (the second musician and sound designer Jack Cawley was unfortunately absent from last night’s show), works in perfect harmony between one another, resulting in performances that stood out in the crowd, as well as an authentic impression of camaraderie.

However, the team spirit highlighted by the performers could not have been achieved without the majestic behind-the-scene work of Motley, Shiels (Lighting/Set Design), Emma O’Kane (Choreography), Dan Colley (Dramaturg) and Margarita Corscadden (Stage Manager) to name but a few. Together they have created a show that will resonate for a long time for the way they approached such a sensitive issue with humour and a caring touch that never slips into stale sympathy or sentimentality.

A truly significant production for years to come, its only lack for me was that it kept me wanting for more.

Even for a company as imaginative as WillFredd Theatre, it would be easy to lose its nerve when dealing with the solemnity of palliative care. The essential work of hospices, treating patients in the final stages of illness, invites an automatic sense of reverence, which would be fatal for a piece of theatre. This astutely judged work defuses it immediately, slyly announcing in its opening moments an approach that is respectful, intelligent and inventive.

As three people sit around a baize-green hospital gurney, a croupier deals out playing cards representing patients (“Home care, medium male”; “Beaumont, low female”) awaiting limited beds.

It might sound callous: playing games with people’s lives. Instead, director Sophie Motley and her collaborators are artfully aware that we are exploring a system and the people who deal with it – in short, who cares? By not putting the patient at the centre, that disarming focusallows for a greater and quite challenging insight: it’s nothing personal.

This also extends to WillFredd’s methods, an abundance of styles and techniques that form a sophisticated and sometimes restless bricolage, a machinery that still aims for emotional effect. A steady series of sequences introduces us to doctors, nurses, therapists and chaplains, structured around the entrance and exit of a patient named “Anne”, represented only by a mannequin, a family tree and a medical history.

Motley’s is far from a clinical exercise, however. Developed over a year spent in consultation with Irish hospices, it is dense with detail yet engagingly spry in its delivery.

Shane O’Reilly’s nurse and Eleanor Methven’s doctor deliver differing perspectives on hospice admission procedure while Seán Mac Erlaine and Jack Cawley supply a softly sighing accompaniment on electric and acoustic instruments. O’Reilly later delivers a song about breathlessness and anxiety that becomes a spiralling human case history resolving in RD Laing’s maxim, “Life is a sexually transmitted disease with a 100 per cent mortality rate”.

Motley and her dramaturg, Dan Colley, have an eye for such eruptions. A comic sequence of hospice workers explaining what they do at dinner parties leads to a phenomenal outburst, conveying frustration and despair that few could put in words. It also means that it is not a retreat when we return to the system itself as a source of succour.

Like the eloquence of Sarah Jane Shiels’s supple design, there is an artful coalescence of technique and theme, where staffroom conversations blur into charming fantasy sequences, or the solving of loaded crossword clues prefigures the final realisation of death.

In Sonya Kelly’s gentle bedside description of a final coping strategy, a system of care is not impersonal, but a necessary paradox, as honoured and consoling as a ritual.

Read it here.