Theatre review: Backstroke

Future Dames Celia Imrie and Tamsin Greig play mother and daughter in Anna Mackmin's Backstroke at the Donald and Margot Warehouse. Beth (Imrie) has had a stroke, and is in hospital unable to move or communicate. When her daughter Bo (Greig) arrives, she bombards the medical staff with demands to know how long her mother has left to live, and for them to take out her drip and stop feeding her. What initially seems like a callous hope that she can get rid of her mother as soon as possible turns out to be genuinely heartfelt concern: Beth spent her entire life insisting that if she ended up in this situation she should be nil by mouth, and there should be no attempts to prolong her life; if anything she asks to be put out of her misery. But as with so much in her life she never actually put her wishes down on paper, and now Bo fears she'll get the prolonged death she always dreaded.

Scenes of Bo in her mother's hospital room alternate with flashbacks that jump around her life, showing the relationship she had with a mother whose insecurity, narcissism and agoraphobia meant she always needed a lot of close attention, and was so chaotic from the start it's hard to pinpoint when her dementia actually started to kick in.

These staged memories are occasionally supplemented by Gino Ricardo Green's projections on the back wall of Lez Brotherston's set, which also give us snatches of Bo's present-day life, in which her relationship with her adopted daughter with behavioural issues and PTSD mirrors the intense attention she's always needed to put into the one with her mother.

Georgina Rich as Beth's doctor, Anita Reynolds as the nice nurse and Lucy Briers as the mean one fill out the backdrop of the woman's final weeks, but the vast majority of the play is dedicated to the two leads, who confidently carry the show: Greig provides the emotional heft and ambiguous feelings of a loving but deeply problematic relationship, while in her waking scenes Imrie gets to be the funny force of nature, a strange mix of Victorian and hippie values with a gleefully inappropriate tendency to make any topic graphically sexual.

But Imrie and Greig really are doing all the heavy lifting here, almost salvaging a play that has promise as an unsentimental look at both love and death, but ends up going round in circles. Mackmin directs her own script, something I'm rarely a fan of, because as is the case here, certain elements stay in that an outside perspective might have pruned. I think the issue was clarified to me when we returned for the second act and got back to the flashbacks: By now these vignettes are adding moments of the women's lives, but no new information about their relationship. And because of her lifelong eccentricities and mental health problems, there's no clear delineation of the person who was lost to dementia and stroke damage. When Beth's death does finally come it still packs a punch, but I wasn't convinced it wouldn't still have done so in a much shorter play.

Backstroke by Anna Mackmin is booking until the 12th of April at the Donmar Warehouse.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.