How do you take two national treasures and make them really quite awful and annoying? Well, like this. Celia Imrie is Beth, the strong-willed, callous, possessive mother of Tamsin Greig’s meeker, milder Bo. After Beth has a stroke, slices of their lives together unfold repetitively in Anna Mackmin’s exploration of motherhood, which seems desperate to be unconventional but plays out with a plodding realism from the opening medical crisis to the inevitable end.
After an accomplished career as a director, Mackmin has added writing to the mix more recently, and she does both here. Maybe that explains the feeling of a production that’s always trying to do too much – from its washed out projections to an undercooked adoption subplot – often to too little effect.
A hospital bed raised centre stage at the back (blue, clinical) bleeds into a cosy kitchen set at the front (earthenware, Aga), while Imrie and Greig shunt between the two spaces. Imrie gets to enjoyably scene-steal as Beth (always Beth, never ‘mum’, you see), with long dyed hair and a frankness about sex that revolts Bo. She’s the kind of person that you’d call bohemian if you actually believed in the Eddie-from-Ab-Fab broad brushstrokes of her character. Still, floating round in billowing robes she provides some nice comic moments. ‘I had a one night stand’, 22-year-old Bo reveals. ‘Finally!,’ Beth replies. ‘Did he have a nice cock?’ Much of the play she spends mutely in bed while completely unconvincing medical business plays out around her.
Greig meanwhile has the most to do, playing Bo from the age of six through the decades, always slightly harried and always trying to please her mother. It’s from Greig that we get any depth and fine detail – it helps that she’s an actor who you can’t help pouring compassion towards. Greig’s looks and gestures give a sense of an invisible tie to Beth that prevents them from ever letting go of each other, and that metaphor, of not letting go, becomes the play’s central one, especially in a heavy-handed and late-arriving swimming scene which feels tacked on.
And to be fair there is a nice tidal quality to the writing, particularly in the opening scenes as we settle into the relationship between Beth and Bo: happy calm moments of their lives suddenly seize up into moments of anguish and distress. It’s always knife-edged whether their conversations will turn deeply tender and loving or abrasive slagging matches.
But the ear quickly attunes to those rhythms which repeat over in the many – too many – unspooling scenes. Despite nipping at big ideas of motherhood, daughterhood, grief, memory and care, all these threads end up a bit of a tangled mess. Even when one thread tautens, something in the overly fussy directing – making coffee, taking blood pressure, all done in unending real time – will make it slacken again.
There’s a sincerity of purpose here, and a desire to move the audience, but the overly contrived quirks and flaws of these two characters – partly hard to like, partly hard to believe – mean that by the irritatingly platitudinous ending, we’ve long had enough.
