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.
I saw this last night with three friends. Three of us were in tears for most of the last half an hour and only one stayed dry eyed.
ReplyDeleteI've recently buried my Nan who died 101 with touches of dementia, someone who typically rallied in their last few days. And my friends have so much of experience of toxic relationships with "mum's"... So maybe the timing between our personal lives and this play made the lines really hit deep for us.
I thought it was so brilliant written. To contain two lifetimes in a few hours. The digs, undermining, callousness.... 'Don't call me mummy, don't call me granny. Don't age me. I gave birth to you but don't acknowledge my age or how old I am".
The only thing I would do it trim 15 minutes from the begining of the first half... I really thought the daughter was the baddie for about 20 minutes. The very early hospital visit scenes did seem to tread water but once we got into the flashbacks, by God I was gone. Swept along.
For me the second half was the happy memories of connection... Dancing together, signing together, swimming together. Holding, partnership. Whereas the first was the toxic ways the relationship had grown from age 6 to 52.
I thought the writing and interpretation of the writing was superb. I was so moved and impressed by how a line like "don't tell me there's so little of me in you that you can't cook"... Summed up that even something as mundane as making a meal was a chance for the mum to undermine her daughter and make it about herself.
I'd definitely have this added to a syllabus at school or college. So clever to study it and have a crash course in emotional survival. GCSE in Toxic mum's and how to cope. (With a counter play for toxic dads).
Loved the staging, set design... The use of the video for the swimming lessons.
Deeply moved. Very impressed and entertained.