Backstroke

by Anna Mackmin

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 6 March 2025

Anna Mackmin directs Tamsin Greig as Bo, Celia Imrie as her mother Beth with Lucy Briers as Carol and Anita Reynolds as Jill (two nurses) and Georgina Rich as Paulina (a consultant) in her own play about a complex mother-daughter relationship further complicated by the mother's advancing dementia and physical incapacity after a stroke.

After a brief depiction of the medical emergency that brought Beth to the hospital, she is immobilised and apparently unconscious as the panicky Bo tries to deal with the consultant's overworked briskness and Carol's old-style nursing approach (that one does what is best for the patient even if the intervention is said to be unwelcome). Unfortunately without the legal authority to impose end-of-life preferences Bo is immediately in a false position in attempting to assert her mother's views on the subject.

The situation is rendered more fraught by Bo's other responsibilities: her daughter is evidently causing disruption at school, and the drive to visit Beth takes several hours, so Bo has to keep appealing to Ted (her partner or husband) to interact with the school. Everything rapidly becomes a burden because too much is happening at once.

Fortunately Celia Imrie is not bed-bound for the entire performance. The often harrowing hospital situation is frequently interspersed with flashbacks in which she is a lively if wayward and self-obsessed single mother, having emerged at some point from communal living to bring up Bo according to her less than conventional principles. But there is an unhealthy co-dependency as it is impossible for Beth to be left alone: clearly many school days were missed (or perhaps Bo was entirely home-schooled), and as Bo prepares to leave for university the emotional blackmail is turned up several notches until she takes her mother with her.

Unsurprisingly Bo is exasperated nearly all the time, and almost unable to cope with her mother's sudden decline. The suffocating constrictions of her upbringing range from being forbidden to call Beth 'mummy' or 'mum' ("I have a name!" Beth insists), to being utterly unable to reach out to her physically in this current emergency. Bo's hand hovers above Beth's shoulder or face without daring a caress a painful number of times during her rushed hospital visits, a mute manifestation of her inner torment.

In an all-purpose setting (designed by Lez Brotherston) the hospital room is at the back of the stage and slightly raised, while in front is the memory room of Bo's adolescence and younger adulthood: a table and chairs to one side and an Aga to the other. Through the flashbacks we learn of the prickly relationship between the two women, usually involving snarky banter but occasionally exploding in rage or frustration. Bo's daughter, it transpires, is adopted, and the action is punctuated with short videos of her night terrors and tantrums. The indications of Beth's dementia creep in as they do, with increasing fumbling with words and repeated comments. The end cannot be anything but sad, despite Bo's extraordinary eulogy of her mother.

The title of the play seems to be connected to one flashback to a happier time in which the half-scared half-excited six-year-old Bo was taught by her mother to swim; this is linked to a gentle gesture (at last) of letting go which, while satisfying in its moment, is perhaps just a shade unlikely as a resolution to a lifetime of frustrated love.

The two central performances are extremely good, but the overall structure requires considerable concentration, and the minor characters are not deeply drawn. The decision to present Bo's own role as a mother largely through projected videos makes for clunky interruptions to the main matter of the play, which is so finely observed between the two women.

The Merry Wives of Windsor

by William Shakespeare

seen by live streaming from Stratford-upon-Avon on 12 September 2018

Fiona Laird directs David Troughton as Sir John Falstaff, Rebecca Lacey as Mistress Page and Beth Cordingley as Mistress Ford in a new RSC production of Shakespeare's domestic comedy cleverly designed by Lez Brotherston in a nebulous time (Tudor ruffs and slinky trouser suits) and a place very clearly east of Windsor: in fact, Essex.

In the pre-performance talk the director admitted to having cut some 23% of the text - the tedious Latin jokes, and any other bits of business that she and the cast felt were not sufficiently funny, certain, apparently, that the play was constructed in an unseemly rush and that the consummate showman Shakespeare would have approved of any amount of editorialising. Some topical references were included (at least one to Brexit), and a fair amount of comic business over and above the classic scene of the laundry basket, here transposed to a wheelie bin. (But then, considering much was made of the smell of the rubbish in the bin, why did no-one behave as if Sir John himself smelled awful even though his clothes were stained?) 

One of the cast reminded us that it was fatal to 'ask' the audience for a laugh - audience laughter had to be earned by taking the characters seriously and allowing the comedy of the situation to do its own work. I am not sure that relying on the stereotypes of Essex derived from a popular TV show actually followed this advice consistently. Some of the cast were so broadly 'Essex' that it was almost impossible to see a human being behind the screeching, though maybe the hidden microphones were flattening out any aural subtlety that the live audience could appreciate.

With these reservations inevitably affecting the overall performance, it was nevertheless an amusing production at many points, largely saved by the fact that David Troughton magnificently followed the precept that his character must take himself seriously; it was only thus that his pomposity could be hilarious, his comeuppances richly deserved yet not painful to watch, and the visual gags about his girth (and his absurd codpieces) amusing rather than distasteful. In the meantime the cod Frenchman (Jonathan Cullen as Doctor Caius) was perhaps more successfully funny than the cod Welshman (David Acton as Sir Hugh Evans), and the rather callow Fenton (Luke Newberry) was gloriously maladroit until Anne Page (Karen Fishwick) thought to give him spectacles. But the young lovers were easily swamped by the mayhem created by the merry wives, while George Page (Paul Dodds) was a cipher and Frank Ford (Vince Leigh) rather overdrawn in his jealousy - again, slapstick tended to triumph over subtlety. 

I'm not sufficiently familiar with the text to know whether the substantial cuts were responsible for these imbalances; at too may times there seemed to be too much shouting, as if only comedy of the broadest brush could be relied on to see everyone through. On the other hand, the material itself is managed with a broad brush, so perhaps one there is no other way to do it in order to get the most out of it.