Tag Archives: Lucy Briers

BACKSTROKE

★★★

Donmar Warehouse

BACKSTROKE

Donmar Warehouse

★★★

“Greig’s encapsulation of the sandwich generation – elderly parent to care for and young children too – is a masterclass in empathy and subtlety”

There’s a sign on the wall on the way into the Donmar theatre warning patrons about the use of herbal cigarettes in the production. There is no sign pre-figuring the far greater traumas the audience is about to experience: the indignity of death, the intrusions of humiliating healthcare, the cruel tricks of a failing brain.

Little wonder then that daughter Bo is keen on a swift departure for Beth, her mother, who has suffered dementia of late, and debilitating strokes.

Bo frets about everything, always has done, so she’s extra keen to convey to the nurses that her actions are merciful and not, as they occasionally hint, cruel and self-serving. Indeed, this was her mother’s repeated wish – pills, pillow over the face, nil by mouth etc.

She was a firecracker in her day, indomitable and difficult, full of life – not this half-inhabited skeleton.

Writer-director Anna Mackmin mines her own experiences to inform a difficult piece that leaps back and forth through time to capture scenes from a fractious mother-daughter relationship.

There are significant problems with the play, but the casting decisions mitigate many. Tamsin Greig as everywoman Bo and Celia Imrie as the feckless bohemian Beth paper over many a structural flaw. They are superb. Funny and touching and bracing. Greig’s encapsulation of the sandwich generation – elderly parent to care for and young children too – is a masterclass in empathy and subtlety.

Bo is dowdy, unkempt and frazzled, scratching out a life in the grout between vast slabs of thankless obligation. Her mother – a peacock in her day – has spent years pointing out her daughter’s shortcomings to the point where Bo has seemly embraced the criticisms in a grim homage. And yet, occasionally Beth (never “mum”) is an inspiration too, a source of joy and laughter.

Fittingly, designer Lez Brotherston’s stage has the operatic hospital bed on a raised stage, surrounded by medical paraphernalia and appearing more like a courtly throne. A step down and we’re in Beth’s ramshackle cottage, firmly frozen in the free-loving 1960s. Here she keeps her loom and her woven artworks. A vast black backdrop fills in some gaps with scratchy projections.

Unfortunately, the play – as baggy as Bo’s “Greenham Common” cardigan – has nowhere particularly to go with this set-up and offers few revelations beyond the Ab-Fab dynamic of selfish mother and attendant child.

There’s a certain shocking delight watching Celia Imrie swear like a trooper or provide a play-by-play recitation of her sexual antics, but this is always going to offer a diminishing return.

Director Anna Mackmin has failed to press writer Anna Mackmin on some key questions. Is it worth two hours? What do we learn? Does the play need another few minutes in the oven to be truly ready?

Her script captures scenes from their life when Bo is six, 18 and off to university (needy mum is desperate not to be left behind), in her 30s, 40s and so on, as though Beth’s failing brain is compiling a highlights reel. But once we have seen one flashback, we have seen them all, and the absence of progress ramps up the need for mawkish sentimentality as filler.

The saving grace is experiencing Tasmin Greig close up in the Donmar’s intimate space. She manages to find grandeur in the gruelling mundane and it is compensation enough.



BACKSTROKE

Donmar Warehouse

Reviewed on 21st February 2025

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Johan Persson

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:

NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812 | ★★★★★ | December 2024
SKELETON CREW | ★★★★ | July 2024
THE HUMAN BODY | ★★★ | February 2024
LOVE AND OTHER ACTS OF VIOLENCE | ★★★★ | October 2021

BACKSTROKE

BACKSTROKE

BACKSTROKE

Orlando

Orlando

★★★★

Garrick Theatre

ORLANDO at the Garrick Theatre

★★★★

Orlando

“The whole show has a fey enchantment to it that will appeal to many, even if the main character remains an enigma”

 

In this adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s uncategorizable novel Orlando, adaptor Neil Bartlett has taken the unusual step of putting the author on stage. Not content to offer us just one Virginia Woolf though, he offers us nine. It’s a clever way to tip off the audience that Orlando is no ordinary biography of an Elizabethan young man, and that his creator is no ordinary writer. In this joint production between Michael Grandage and Nimax Theatres at the Garrick Theatre, audiences have the opportunity to see Emma Corrin (fresh from her success on TV in The Crown) on stage as the hero/heroine Orlando. Corrin is surrounded by a cast of performers who shift from character to character, gender to gender, and age to age. They are all as chameleon like as the eponymous character in Woolf’s classic novel.

Wait a minute, I hear you say, hero/heroine Orlando? What does that mean? For those who haven’t read Woolf’s Orlando, the story goes something like this. An aristocratic young man, born in 1581 at the height of the Elizabethan Age, wakes up to find he has transformed from male into female after a particularly hard night partying in Istanbul where he is the English Ambassador to the Turkish Court. Lady Orlando, as s/he now becomes, returns to England to find at first hand, all the difficulties of living while female. From inheritances she cannot claim; clothes she cannot wear, and a husband that she must take, Lady Orlando struggles through the Georgian, Victorian and finally, early twentieth century, asking the unanswerable: Who Am I? Did I mention that Orlando is also a time traveller, and ages only twenty years in four centuries? What Virginia Woolf has given us in Orlando is a novel that isn’t science fiction, or a biography. Written in 1928, it is, instead, a thinly disguised celebration of her lover, Vita Sackville-West, and part of a series of revolutionary writings on a woman’s right to self-expression and self-determination. What makes it revolutionary, even today, is that Woolf sees these aims through the eyes of a human who can experience life through the perspective of shifting gender.

Adaptor Neil Bartlett has set himself a complex and challenging task with Orlando. First there is Woolf’s novelistic prose style and the lavish descriptions, as Orlando is not just a courtier, but a poet. How do you transfer Woolf’s prose style to the dramatic language of the theatre? To his credit, Bartlett gets around the problem by bringing on all those Virginias to make Orlando’s case for him/her. Corrin, as Orlando, is an actor up to the challenge of making Orlando come alive on stage. Corrin’s portrayal of Orlando’s innocence and naivety contrast sympathetically with the ever changing cast of characters who attempt to use Orlando for their own ends. They fail because Orlando is outside their experience of humans. And it is this, paradoxically, that makes the production ultimately unsatisfying. It’s because no one, including Orlando, has a really good answer to the question “Who Am I?” Orlando becomes a narrative, rather than a drama, relying heavily on quotes from Woolf, Shakespeare, Pope, and others, to create settings, rather than a plot.

Bartlett shows his theatrical skills in Orlando not so much as a playwright, but in his previous experience as a director. It is in direction that this production really sparkles. And as a director, Michael Grandage’s experience and artistry shows in the way he gathers together his talented cast of eleven, and gives them the space to shine in a variety of roles on a bare bones stage. The stage is populated from time to time with beds, backdrops, and costume racks. (Set and costume design by Peter McIntosh). Just enough to set the scene among a host of short scenes as the centuries pass. Deborah Findlay as Mrs Grimsditch is the one constant in Orlando’s life, mysteriously appearing at random moments to advise on everything from appropriate dress to the date. She also provides a quick sketch of historical events to bring young Orlando (and the audience) up to speed. Findlay’s performance is both endearing and accessible—allowing everyone to anchor themselves among the shifting seas of Woolf’s imagination. The whole show has a fey enchantment to it that will appeal to many, even if the main character remains an enigma.

There are lots of theatrical moments in this production of Orlando, and the Garrick Theatre is the perfect space to show them off. There’s a lot of sly humour in the dialogue as well. This show is a good choice if you’re looking for something different from the usual ballet and pantomime offerings this holiday season. If you’re intrigued by the idea of Virginia Woolf reinterpreted for the stage, why not give Orlando a chance?

 

 

Reviewed on 6th December 2022

by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Marc Brenner

 

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:

 

Myra Dubois: Dead Funny | ★★★★ | September 2021

 

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