A STROKE OF FATE
SINEAD KEENAN, ALISON STEADMAN AND SHERIDAN SMITH STAR IN A POWERFUL ONE-OFF DRAMA…
Inside TV is used to seeing some fairly incongruous sights when we visit the sets of upcoming shows, but sitting opposite Alison Steadman in the production crew’s trailer while she’s wearing a hospital gown and eating an ice cream definitely ranks among the stranger situations we’ve been in.
The reason for her attire is that Alison is starring in one-off drama Care as Mary
Taylor, whose life is changed forever when she suffers a stroke while driving, leaving her with dementia and severely impairing her ability to communicate.
“As you can see, I’m full of glamour!” jokes Alison. “Yes, this is what I’d call a challenging role, but one that I sort of approach with relish because it’s such a worthwhile piece – Jimmy Mcgovern [who co-wrote the script with Gillian Juckes] is such a good writer, and I thought, ‘Whatever he gives me, I can trust’. The character is a lively woman, very energetic, with a couple of grandkids, a fun kind of lady and then – bang – she has the stroke and it changes her life totally. So it’s the story of her, her two daughters and her grandkids, and how they cope – and how the NHS copes.”
With Mary no longer able to care for herself, and the health service lacking the resources to give her the attention she needs, her daughters Jenny (Sheridan Smith) and Claire (Sinead Keenan) are faced with difficult decisions about how best to look after her.
“Jenny and her family don’t know how to react,” explains Sheridan. “When something that massive happens, you do think, ‘How would a family react to that?’ A number of my friends have had parents and grandparents with dementia, and speaking to them taught me a lot. And Alison has done a lot of research to allow for as accurate a performance as possible, so a lot of the time I’m purely reacting to her.”
“My character lives away, whereas Jenny sees her mum every day,” reveals Sinead. “And due to their situation, Jenny does the lion’s share because logistically she’s right there. Of course, that does mean there’s a little bit of resentment, but they’re still close. It’s not a ‘good cop, bad cop’ kind of thing.”
While Mary’s post-stroke speech sounds like a jumble of unconnected words to her daughters, viewers are given an insight into Mary’s feelings by on-screen captions revealing what she’s really trying to say – and Alison admits that her character’s lines are a challenge to learn.
“It’s quite hard to learn gobbledegook,” she reveals. “Only moving half of my mouth has been a challenge, but a good one, because you have to think in different ways. You’re paralysed down one side, you’re being pushed in a wheelchair and you’re suddenly seeing life from a very different perspective.
It’s frightening.”
“I think it’s almost taboo – we don’t
SEEING LIFE FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE IS FRIGHTENING”
ALISON
want to think of ourselves as getting old,” muses Sinead. “Even though it’s coming down the tracks for all of us, you kind of forget about it. If we’re lucky enough to live to a ripe old age, fully in charge of all our faculties, then great. But a lot of the time we don’t, and we need care. You wouldn’t leave a child who needed care to fend for themselves or to just rot away somewhere, and yet we kind of do that to our elderly. It’s baffling.”