Anna Mackmin’s “Back Stroke”
The centrepiece of Anna Mackmin’s tragicomic new play “Backstroke” is a bed in the acute stroke unit of a modern hospital - a topic of which I have extensive recent experience. As far as the nurses and terminology are concerned, I recognize everything.
Much else rings true about this play which opened at the Donmar Warehouse on Thursday 20 February,concerns the relationship of a flamboyantly subversive Bohemian mother, Beth (Celia Imrie) and her daughter, Bo (Tamsin Greig). Plenty of Beth’s very English flamboyance is linguistic: she enjoys swearing, quoting, snobbish putdowns, and verbal playfulness. (She refers to dementia as “demensh”. ) But it’s visual, too. Even in old age, she also wears her hair down to her waist, with several colours; she designs items of interior decoration. And she has next to no money. Although we can see why Beth often exasperates her daughter – and occasionally the reverse – theirs is a rounded, affectionate, detailed connection.
“Backstroke” abounds in Beth’s flashbacks about her mother and herself – some of them relayed in black-and-white on a screen at the back of the stage. We see Bo from about age six to fifty-one. In a touching scene near the end, she helps the now unconscious Beth to die. And the play ends with her eulogy to thismother she has now lost and can never forget.
The flashbacks aren’t chronological. Tamsin Greig, especially, is taxed by having to play hopscotch to and fro across the decades: marvellous actress though she is, she isn’t always convincing in her various child voices. She also overdoes the role’s many hesitations – Bo is often her mother’s minder, The production – both Beth and Bo are huge roles - hadn’t quite relaxed on press night. (Mackmin directs.) There’s a farce-like scene in which three nurses enter to catch Bo apparently helping her mother to masturbate beneath the sheets: this will probably be four times as hilarious when all the actors have mastered the timing.
The role of Bo, though often difficult in the volleys of words she keeps firing off, fits Celia Imrie like a glove. It has her qualities of larkiness, classiness, and eventual toughness. When she corrects the term “craft fair” to “exhibition” to explain the venue at which her art is shown, using the full force of her chest voice, she wins maybe the biggest laugh of the evening.
Bit by bit and blow by blow, “Back Stroke” is diverting and affecting. When it’s relaxed in performance, it may also feel like a play. On press night, it seemed breathless: a rapid-fire patchwork of Beth-Bo memories that never quite settled.
@Alastair Macaulay, 2025
