Though the publicity image for Backstroke shows swimmers and writer / director Anna Mackmin’s play includes a similar scene of a six-year old’s swimming lesson, it isn’t about swimming. It opens with a huddle of paramedics around an elderly woman who has had a stroke. Immediately, we see her in bed in hospital and the play intercuts between her hospital room and scenes that are flashbacks.
Lez Brotherston’s set puts Beth’s hospital room on a rostrum; below it downstage is an Aga-equipped kitchen where the past is played out, and above is a video screen where scribbles and spots seem to show the synapse malfunctions in 76-year-old brain or resolve into the memories that lurk there. Memories differ and time often distorts them, but what we see on screen seems more like Beth’s version, while those played out downstage are the way her daughter Bo recalls them.
It has not been an easy mother-daughter relationship. There have been good times, but too often Beth didn’t give the support that was needed: Bo felt her mother had failed her. Now Bo, torn between filial duties and coping with the problems caused by her own adopted daughter, guiltily feels she is failing her mother.
Bo accuses Beth (who insists on the use of her first name and not “Mummy”) of habits “left over from '70s communal living”, and her behaviour, including a description of her sex with a partner Bo clearly doesn’t like, seems to predate her descent into dementia. An artist making woven hangings which her daughter admired, she could turn a phrase, describing poetry as “list-writing masquerading as art”. Celia Imre, while making her insufferably self-centred, gives her a spirit that you can’t help liking. She had said she didn’t want to be artificially kept living, but left no written instructions. Now she is unable to communicate, and Bo battles with a consultant (Georgina Rich), who sees her job as keeping life going, and nurse Carol (Lucy Briers), another who follows the rulebook, though Anita Reynolds’s nurse Jill shows more compassion. Imre can switch in a moment from the woman confused and in pain to the hippy eccentric and can be very funny, as when she plans to wear a flowery wreath to a wedding.
It is Tamsin Greig’s Bo who gets the most sympathy, perhaps because (like many in the audience) her experience is closer to my own. Greig captures the quandary of Bo’s current situation and her past exasperation with her mother’s behaviour, but the bond between them is equally evident, her caring beautifully rendered as she sings her mute mother a lullaby and delicately balancing pathos and humour in a long eulogy that could so easily become mawkish.
Backstroke doesn’t tell us anything new, and it offers a series of situations rather than a narrative that explores the relationship, but as director, Anna Mackmin makes it hold attention and Imre and Greig in the lead roles make it an evening worth watching.