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
