CARE puts spotlight on life in an Irish hospice

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

The ups and downs of hospice life are captured in CARE, the latest production from Dublin’s WillFredd Theatre which will be staged at the city’s Town Hall Theatre this Friday at 8pm.

Director Sophie Motley is doing this interview just after attending a show in Cork especially for people who work in the hospice there, and she’s delighted with the response.

“It was great to have people laughing at the gags,” she says.

You mightn’t imagine a show set in a hospice would be overburdened with gags, but as Sophie points out, this play is “like having a mirror put up to yourself, reflecting what you do in your daily life”, and that includes laughter as well as sadness as staff  give baths, paint nails, refill syringes, and throw clay at the walls with children. Some pray, some don’t.

The WillFredd cast and crew met “a lot of incredibly caring people while researching CARE and the play is a replica of what we found,” says Sophie.

“In this play about death and dying and palliative care, we have learned from hospice staff that you have to live your life.”

As for the play’s title, it sums up the ethos of the hospice movement.

“With palliative care, the word ‘care’ is really important. It’s about treating a patient and their family rather than a disease,” says Sophie.

CARE, which fuses movement and live music with text, was first performed in 2014, after a 14-month development period in conjunction with St Francis Hospice in Raheny, Dublin. All the dialogue is based on interviews with staff, reflecting their experiences and emotions. And, in keeping with the authentic spirit, CARE’s choreography is based on a physiotherapy technique known as Bobath.

WillFredd previously did a short performance of the piece in Galway Hospice for the staff there as part of its ethos of connecting with palliative care workers everywhere.

“CARE is for staff of hospices as much as it is for theatre-goers,” explains Sophie, who in addition to her work with WillFredd, is a regular staff director at English National Opera and was resident assistant director at the Abbey Theatre.

Both Sophie and her co-artistic director in WillFredd, Sarah Jane Shiels, had previously experienced the work of the hospice movement through family illness.

“It made us aware of palliative-care workers, how they do it and why they do it. And it made us question the difference between palliative care and acute care.”

The difference of course, is that if you are a doctor in acute care, your role is to cure people, but that’s not the case with hospice workers, she says.

“In palliative care, you know you are never going to cure someone, so how do you do that difficult job and how do you mind yourself when you are doing it?”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.