Backstroke
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...