Review: BACKSTROKE, Starring Tamsin Greig

“They f**k you up, your mum and dad” wrote Philip Larkin. Yes, replies writer Anna Mackmin, but sometimes in the best kind of way.

Cycles of fractured motherhood spin and splinter across generations in Anna Mackmin’s new play. But even with polyphonic performances from veteran thesps Tamsin Grieg and Celia Imre, both at the top of their game, this bittersweet melodrama doesn’t hit as hard as it could.

Fuelled by a diet of cynicism and cigarettes, Beth is a former flower power child who refuses to grow up. Every other line is a snark laden jab. She is somewhere between a Hampstead dwelling Iris Murdoch character and Patsy from Ab-Fab. Now bound with dementia to a hospital bed in a near vegetative state, her freewheeling effervescence is a whisper of her daughter Bo’s memories. We witness episodes from her childhood where Beth’s bittersweet self-absorption crowds out Bo who is left to raise herself.

There’s a suggestion that Beth’s eccentric hyperactivity is a symptom of autism, ADHD, or both. But Mackmin doesn’t chastise Beth’s refusal to fulfil her maternal duty. She peels back each layer of their strained relationship until the bare bones of their love emerge: more like sisters than a mother and daughter and though fraught with knotty tension, a faint ray of tender light gently emerges from beneath, slowly illuminating the room with heartfelt warmth.

Between balancing caring for Beth, fragments of Bo’s own problematic motherhood flash through projections, deftly crafted by Paule Constable’s lighting design. Images of tense stand offs with Bo’s own adopted daughter, heavily implied to be autistic, flash and flicker, aching with pain. But Mackmin doesn’t do enough to link images. Backstroke wants to map how the tendrils of Beth’s failure as a mother dig their fingers across generations. But Bo’s failure as a mother is not realised enough to render the desired conclusion in full.

Backstroke may never be more than the sum of its parts but Celia Imre and Tamsin Greig’s Bo are a match made in theatre heaven. Imre is all pouting lips, an angular glare crowned above a perma-scowl of snobbery and disapproval. You can’t help but bask in her prima donna chutzpah. Grieg is the balancing counterpoint, clenched jitteriness, habitually wiping sweaty palms on her jeans when caring for her bedridden mother, but tenderly melting into youthful volatility when her memories of childhood take centre stage. It’s worth it for their quietly towering performances alone.

Backstroke plays The Donmar Warehouse until 12 April

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