In Beyond Caring, Alexander Zeldin created a highly praised drama out of a group of cleaners working on zero-hours contracts. Now he has written, with the collaboration of his cast, a 90-minute piece about homeless people living in temporary accommodation. It is filled with observant compassion but at first I found myself craving more political anger. Only later did I grasp that Zeldin leaves it to us to supply the appropriate rage.
The play focuses on two families. Colin, middle-aged and jobless, acts as carer to his incontinent elderly mum, Barbara. Their immediate neighbours are a family of four crammed into a single room: Dean wrestles daily with an obdurate bureaucracy, his partner Emma is three weeks away from giving birth and their two children attend school where they are preparing for the annual nativity play. Much of the action takes place in the communal area, where we meet a Syrian teacher with leanings towards the ballet and a solitary Sudanese woman.
Zeldin creates engrossing drama out of the daily rituals of survival. Meals are cooked. People compete for access to the one toilet. In the most touching scene, Colin washes his mother’s hair at the sink in Fairy liquid. But, while Zeldin shows rather than tells, he makes the point that these people have done nothing wrong: they are simply victims of a dearth of social housing and arbitrary caps to the benefit system. They are also made to suffer needlessly. Colin waits five hours for a five-minute appointment, only to be told there is nowhere for his mum and him to go. Dean has had his benefits cut for just missing a jobcentre date, on the day he and his family were evicted.
Zeldin is not alone in drawing attention to the cracks in the welfare system. Cardboard Citizens have for 25 years made theatre with and for homeless people. Ken Loach in Cathy Come Home and I, Daniel Blake ignited our anger at injustice. Anders Lustgarten in The Seven Acts of Mercy makes high drama out of forced deprivation. But Zeldin’s particular achievement is to show people’s capacity for endurance. Tempers may flare and tensions rise, but his play is both about the dignity and the love that survive even in the harshest circumstances.
Played with the house lights full on, the production also shows the cast seeming to live rather than act. Anna Calder-Marshall and Nick Holder as mother and son establish a totally believable mutual dependence. Luke Clarke and Janet Etuk behave like a couple whose tolerance is severely tested and whose children react in different ways: there are alternating casts but, on press night, Yonatan Pelé Roodner as their son had the right surly taciturnity and Emily Beacock as their daughter a bright-eyed cheeriness. At the end, the house rose to the actors. But our gorges should also rise at the play’s potent reminder that we live in a rich country that treats poverty as if it were a crime.
• At the National Theatre, London, until 10 January. Box office: 020-7452 3000. At Birmingham Rep, 26 January – 11 February. Box office: 0121 236 4455.
