Backstroke, Donmar Warehouse review - a complex journey through a mother-daughter relationship

The theatre director Anna Mackmin has written and directed an extraordinary play about a mother and daughter relationship: extraordinary because it puts the audience inside the maelstrom of these characters’ lives, forcing us to focus on how we interpret them and how our lives might resemble theirs.

Things start relatively straightforwardly. A hospital bed dominates the raised half of the stage, with all the familiar accessories: the nurses’ sink in the corner, the IV drip stand, the urine bag. At the top of the back wall is a panoramic screen; at the front of the stage, a country kitchen area that shrieks late 1960s, with the requisite Aga, bright orange enamel cooking pot and pine furniture. On the screen, a long-haired woman stumbles through a garden gate; as it clangs shut behind her, we see where she has arrived – as the catatonic patient in the bed, chin jutting imperiously upwards.

This is Beth (Celia Imrie), 76, referred to as “Beth Anne” by Carol (Lucy Briers, pictured below left, centre, with Anita Reynolds, left, and Georgina Rich), the by-the-book Welsh nurse trying to minister to her. Enter a stressed woman in her fifties, Beth’s daughter Bo (Tamsin Greig, pictured below, right), who immediately begins to wrangle with Carol about her mother’s food intake. There is no end-of-life plan on paper, just a daughter’s intimate knowledge of her mother’s (intense) likes and dislikes, cherry yogurt being one of them. She wants her mother off the drip and receiving nil by mouth, as verbally requested. Beth can’t contribute to this debate as she can only communicate in puffs and spits.

There are two, clashing versions of Beth at this stage: nurse Carol’s Beth Anne, whom she is trying to treat for sciatica, a condition Beth’s partner Dominic claims she has; and Bo’s wildly eccentric, wilful parent, who probably doesn’t suffer from sciatica but may be agoraphobic and claustrophobic, all possibly psychosomatic symptoms. The brisk consultant (Georgina Rich) is clear on the issue: Beth has had an “impressively small stroke”. “Impressive?!“ snarls Bo in response, a first sign that she is somebody to be reckoned with.  

But this is not a diatribe about the shortcomings of modern hospital care. As Bo sits with Beth, she calls her “Mummy”, and Beth springs into life, fiercely rejecting the term. She has always been called by her first name. Mackmin then takes us on an odyssey across the decades, circling to points as far back as Beth teaching Bo to float at a swimming pool aged five, and stopping off at key way-stations in their lives together. 

The comic potential of Beth’s hippiedom is fully exploited by Imrie, who wafts around in a long layered garments, a 1960s embroidered fringed shawl round her shoulders, the tips of her long wavy grey hair tinted a dark pink. A rustic Morticia Addams, dedicated to sexual pleasure, independence and weaving, her main stream of income. Mackmin gives her some priceless retorts and putdowns. She comes across as a cross between a monster and a grande dame, gifted at getting her own way with perfectly judged histrionics. As she ages, the malapropisms her encroaching dementia produces are treasurable too – mis-saying Bo is “futile” when the word she can’t locate is “fertile". 

Bo’s character is coloured in by fits and starts too: a happy child until she is 13, apparently, but then increasingly at loggerheads with Beth, whom she accuses of poor parenting. We see them have a comparatively joyous New Year’s Eve, idiot dancing to T-Rex’s “Get It On”, Bo in what Beth calls her “Greenham Common cardi”. But their relationship descends into ferocious bickering as Bo ages and struggles to be a successful children’s book writer. With her partner Ted (Rashan Stone, seen only in some of the projected videos), she battles to be a good parent herself to adopted daughter Skylar, whose behaviour keeps leading her to be ejected from school. “Come, come, come!” yells Skylar at night to her exhausted parents. Bo turns into a quintessential “sandwich” mother, stretched wafer-thin between the demands of caring for Beth and caring for Skylar. Who is the alpha mother now? 

It’s a complex brew, with short bursts of projected film punctuating the fragments of dialogue, where we see, inter alia, mother and daughter at the pool, underwater and on the beach. Lez Brotherston’s set also provides a sliding panel in the back wall where the characters can appear. After each short interlude, Beth returns to her coma-like state. But elements are repeated, overlapping and mirroring each other – both women singing “Grey goose and gander”, both holding the other and telling her to relax and learn to fly away.Incrementally Mackmin’s intent becomes clear as the narrative layers build up. In one scene, Bo’s news stirs up painful memories of her own for Beth, whose grief we notice, though Bo doesn’t, and we begin to realise Bo is not the sole possessor of the truth about her. More pointedly still, one of the projected films shows Beth congratulating Bo about her adopting of Skylark and trying to help her, a constant refrain of hers, usual seen as irritatingly insincere by Bo. But this filmed Beth is kindly and warm – and closer to the truth than Bo’s lurid vision of her? What we have been watching is a reincarnation of these memories, a working out for Bo of a primal relationship, sifting what’s true from what’s not so true, that allows her to truly parent her mother as her life ebbs away. 

Imrie and Greig are superb in all the different manifestations of these two women. By the final scene, where Bo reads out a ragbag list of “What My Mother Taught Me” items, many watching will be nodding in recognition, probably with tears in their eyes even as they laugh along. It’s a fitting kind of closure to an exceptional theatrical workout.  

• Backstroke at Donmar Warehouse until 12 April 
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