Theatre review: Backstroke with Tamsin Greig & Celia Imrie – Donmar Warehouse

Debut play prises open mother-daughter relationship

★★★★

Amiddle-aged woman and an old woman sit opposite each other at a kitchen table — Tamsin Greig & Celia Imrie in Backstroke. Photo: Johan Persson

Backstroke is a debut play receiving its premiere at the Donmar Warehouse. It’s about a daughter remembering and reassessing her relationship with her dying mother. And when this particular mother and daughter are played by Celia Imrie and Tamsin Greig, you know you’re in for a treat.

It’s not a usual occurrence to have your first play premiered at the Donmar Warehouse with Tamsin Greig and Celia Imrie as the stars. Then again, Anna Mackmin is not your usual playwright. She is steeped in theatre. Having been to acting school, she became a director and for the last twenty years has been behind some of the most memorable productions on the London stage, including Dancing At Lughnasa, The Real Thing and Hedda Gabler at the Old Vic, and Di and Viv and Rose and The Divine Mrs S at Hampstead. And who better to direct her first play than Anna Mackmin herself?

This is not her first piece of writing. Her 2018 novel Devoured, inspired by her childhood with a hippy mother, was well received. So, perhaps the first thing to say about Backstroke is that it is a beautifully written drama. It uses the stage well, it gives the actors plenty to get their teeth into, and it tells a good story as it prises open the oyster of their relationship to reveal the unexpected pearl within.

We first encounter Beth, played by Celia Imrie, in a hospital bed, symbolically at the highest, most central point of Lez Brotherston’s set. She is being visited by her daughter Bo, played by Tamsin Greig. After about ten minutes of Bo talking to her silent mother, who has had a stroke, and to the various medical staff, I began to think ‘Celia Imrie’s got an easy role’. Then we got into the nitty gritty of the drama.

Triggered by the possibly imminent death of her mother, Bo’s thoughts travel to the past. As they do, Celia Imrie slides out of bed and walks down to the front of the thrust stage, into the kitchen where so many encounters between them took place over the years. We begin to learn about the tempestuous relationship between a mother who is very needy and a daughter who is expected to cater for those needs. There is love, there is attachment, and there is conflict as the play gradually unravels their complex ties.

No mothers are perfect but Beth is self-centred, avoids intimacy, and doesn’t really want to acknowledge that she is her child’s mother (‘don’t call me mummy’) even though this would-be free spirit needs the stability and companionship of her daughter. We experience Bo’s frustration when, for example, Beth hasn’t woken her, as promised, and she will be late for her first day at college. Then we, along with Bo, realise that it’s because she doesn’t want to part with her.

Parallel to this, Bo is tied up with the challenge of being a mother herself to an adopted daughter who is finding it difficult to settle into family and school. So, she is attempting to balance the needs of her daughter, her career and her dying mother. Beth, by the way, is hundreds of miles away, which means Bo has the guilt of not being able to visit often enough, and the guilt of being away from her daughter. A feeling which I’m sure will be familiar to many in the audience.

Uplifting and heartbreaking

Part of the power of this play is Anna Mackmin’s ability to take you inside the heads of these characters. Celia Imrie’s larger-than-life Beth talks in florid language that has the effect of creating a shield to keep her daughter at bay, but often there is a look of fear behind her eyes. Tamsin Greig’s Bo develops from childhood to middle age, her enthusiasm gradually dampened, her youthful protest turning to a whine. But always there is a nervous need to understand what’s going on in her mother’s brain. She frequently pauses to process events. Used to feeling frustrated, she is almost permanently open-mouthed, but has a warm smile that refutes her inherited dislike of the intimacy of touching.

Backstroke at the Donmar. Photo: Johan Persson

All the while, fragments of Bo’s memories of both her mother and daughter play on a large backdrop. I’m not normally a fan of mixing film with live drama but in this case the video designed by Gino Ricardo Green is highly effective in showing how memories are always with us and shape who we are.

When Beth’s brain starts to be affected by dementia, although some of the things she says are humorous, like ‘You’ve made your bed, now you can lie about it’, Bo, and we, soften in our feelings about her. Beth has never been able to help being the way she is.

The first act is a little too long but after the interval the play explodes into life. We learn that the relationship was not as one-sided as it first appeared. The episodes in their life together show us how the bond is mutual, and how Bo has much to be grateful to her mother for. When they dance together, choreographed incidentally by Anna Mackmin’s sister Scarlett, it is a joyous moment.

The ending is both uplifting and heartbreaking, as the most intimate moment between them when Bo was a child is resurrected in Beth’s last moments. A circle has been completed and, in an epilogue, Bo speaks movingly of what her late mother did for her. Tamsin Greig’s emotional delivery brought a lump to my throat.

Although her mother’s mortality is what prompts Bo’s memories of her, the play also touches on the process of dying itself. There is consideration of how we treat people at the end of life. The hospital staff shows us three approaches to patients who to them have no history, and, more to the point, no memory: there is the objective indifference of Georgina Rich‘s matter-of-fact doctor to whom Beth is just another unit; a nurse Carol, given a terrific sour-mouthed performance by Lucy Briers, who tries to impose her own moral agenda on the treatment; and there’s nurse Jill, convincingly played by Anita Reynolds, who reveals the heart beneath her patronising chirpiness. Inevitably, the mainly absent Beth is frustrated that the staff don’t understand her mother’s care needs in the way she does.

This is an extraordinarily good debut play.

Backstroke can be seen at the Donmar Warehouse until 12 April 2025. Buy tickets direct from the theatre.

Paul attended a preview and paid for his ticket.

Click here to watch this review on the YouTube channel Theatre Reviews With Paul Seven

December 28, 2022May 4, 2023

Emma Corrin in Orlando – Garrick Theatre – Review

Crown star Emma Corrin is mesmerising in comedy about gender freedom

★★★★

Emma Corrin as Orlando at the Garrick Theatre 2022 — Emma Corrin in Orlando. Photo: Marc Brenner

It may be nearly a hundred years since Virginia Woolf wrote the novel Orlando, but it’s only todat that our society has caught up with its story about the fluidity of gender, desire and time. As the novel, quoted in the play, says: ‘If you can just live another century.’

Emma Corrin, probably best known as young Princess Diana in The Crown, plays the eponymous protagonist. When the play begins, Orlando is a young male aristocrat in the court of Queen Elizabeth I.

In our first encounter with him, we catch a glimpse of a penis. It’s a startling and funny moment that sets the scene for the rest of the evening. His trusty servant-come-dresser-come-tutor-come-guardian angel Mrs Grimsditch tries to get him to put his trousers on. Deborah Findlay is funny, warm and down-to-earth, providing a necessary foil for Emma Corrin who gives a mesmerising performance as the romantic, confused, freedom-loving hero. The symbolic trouser-wearing is a motif throughout the play.

Even if they prefer the non-binary pronoun ‘they’, Emma Corrin, of course, doesn’t have a penis. It’s a theatrical prop. Before long, Orlando has lost that organ and mysteriously become a woman, as well as moving on many years to the court of James I without getting much older. To confirm the sex change, we catch a glimpse of her breasts, which I think were real but this is theatre, a world of pretence, so who knows?

In fact, theatre is a theme of this play. It moves through many theatrical styles as Orlando navigates from Elizabethan (a hint of Shakespeare) to Jacobean to Regency to Victorian times to the gradual liberation of the modern era. This substitutes for the literary journey that Orlando undertakes in the original novel. Theatre is not as effective a barometer for the changing attitudes to women, but it works nicely as a metaphor for being whatever you want to be.

To support the theme, Michael Grandage and designer Peter McKintosh have created a set that looks like a bare stage with brickwork and a large metal door. It’s populated with the trappings of a theatre- ropes and counterweights, a large costumes basket, a clothes rail, a stepladder and more. The set frequently features a bed that starts large and becomes much smaller in Victorian times (the worst of all periods for women). Having set up the theme, I think Neil Bartlett could have put it across more strongly in the script. There seems to be no equivalent of the constantly changing book that Orlando is writing and that provides a unifying thread through the novel.

From the start, this dramatised version offers the kind of inventive freewheeling imagination found in the original novel, because no less than nine Virginia Woolfs appear, speaking together and separately, to tell us the multi-faceted story of Orlando.

View of Emma Corrin's naked back in Orlando at The Garrick Theatre London — Emma Corrin in Orlando. Photo: Marc Brenner

Much as she liked being a man, Orlando likes being a woman more and that’s how they remain, as the play develops into a romp through three centuries of the history of women in our society. And just as there are many different Virginia Woolfs, Orlando discovers there are many different ways we can desire. They also realise that time is elastic rather than linear, and that (spoiler alert) life needs to be enjoyed go the full in the here and now. It is above all a story that lauds the freedom of poetic imagination above the prosaic.

Orlando finds out what it is to be a woman, an experience made more shocking by them having been a man. They experience the disturbing effect a bare leg can have on heterosexual men and the way misogynistic men subjugate women. They realise that women can love each other, that love and betrayal go hand in hand. They find that men and women can dress up as each other for practical as well as sexual purposes.

Emma Corrin and Deborah Findlay stand shoulder to shoulder in a scene form Orlando at the Garrick Theatre 2022 — Emma Corrin and DEborah Fidnlay in Orlando. Photo: Marc Brenner

Orlando is an everyperson rather than an intrepid hero or overpowering genius. Emma Corrin is tremendous at portraying the inarticulacy of the character, the frequent lack of understanding, but also the enthusiasm and optimism. They dominate the stage with their wide eyes, knotted features, hesitant speech, squirming body and sparkling smile. It’s a performance that is both funny and sad, and thoroughly engaging. As with the relationship between Orlando and Mrs Grimsditch, Emma Corrin’s youthful exuberance is balanced by the twinkly-eyed experience of Deborah Findlay.

In a play where gender is fluid, an entirely female cast bar one takes on all the roles, which of course leads to some mockery of men. Lucy Briers memorably plays a blustering naval officer who moves like a bantam cock. She also provides a haughty Queen Elizabeth.

Although writer Neil Bartlett couldn’t hope to convey the depth and complexity of Virginia Woolf’s novel, he does pick the important themes and moments, and by introducing the author onto the stage we get to hear direct quotes from the novel in her stream-of-consciousness way of writing.

Missing, in this fast moving 80 minute play, were the deeper relationships. Orlando’s first love Sasha whom they never forget, is played with verve by Millicent Wong, and their last Marmaduke is given a sensitive portrayal by Jodie McNee. But these lovers flash by as we skim across the surface of Orlando’s life. Their journey is not always pleasant, but it is ultimately optimistic.

Orlando is an entertaining evening thanks in no small part to Emma Corrin who displays all the signs of being a great star of the stage.

Orlando is playing at the Garrick Theatre in London until 25 February 2023.

Click here to watch this review on our YouTube channel Theatre.Reviews With Paul Seven

May 15, 2019July 24, 2019

Rosmersholm with Hayley Atwell & Tom Burke – review

Avengers star Hayley Atwell is forceful co-star with Tom Burke

[usr=5]

Production photo of hayley at well in Rosmersholm at Duke Of York's theatre in London May 2019 — Hayley Atwell in Rosmersholm. Photo: Johan Persson

Rosmersholm is about wanting to pursue passion and change but being held back by the past – the political system, religion, inhertitance.

At the beginning, everything is covered in dustsheets in this stately home- Rosmersholm. The walls show signs of flood damage at the lower levels. It’s murky. Until Hayley Atwell playing Rebecca West starts pulling the sheets off and letting the light in.

It’s a year since Rosmer’s wife committed suicide in the lake and clogged up the millwheel, thus causing a flood.

Production shot of Rosmersholm at the duke Of York's theatre in London — Photo: Johan Persson

Her death raised questions, the main one being why did she do it? Rosmer is weighed down by his past. Not only the recent tragic event of his wife’s death but his whole inheritance. The high walls of Rae Smith’s brilliant set are covered in paintings of his ancestors staring down. He is expected to keep the line going.

Production shot of Giles Terera in Rosmersholm at the Duke Of York's Theatre in London — Giles Terera in Rosmersholm. Photo: Johan Persson

We are on the eve of an election and people are looking for a lead from Rosmer. But his disillusionment with the political system, where everyone is in it for themselves is profound. He renounces his traditional party- the conservatives, whose representative is superbly conveyed by Giles Terera as the likeable but ruthless Kroll who views women and the working class with contempt. So it seems Rosmer should back the radicals but both sides take against him. Both own newspapers that lie about him. You see there are many modern parallels.

Production shot of tom Burke in Rosmersholm at Duke Of York's Theatre in London — Tom Burke in Rosmersholm. Photo: Johan Persson

Mildly spoken Tom Burke as Rosmer pefectly conveys the uncertainty that alternates with his passion for Rebecca.

Good as Mr Burke is, the evening belongs to Hayley Atwell as Rebecca. She is the force of change and she is a force on the stage. Her performance is bravura but always believable. However even Rebecca is dragged down by the past.

This is an excellent cast. Lucy Briers is the housekeeper, representing the dour working class, still mired in superstition and believing what she reads in the papers. Jake Fairbrother is the radical newspaper editor, previously driven out of the town by holier-than-thou outrage, led by Rosmer, who is now the victim of the same high mindedness himself. Peter Wight is the faded leftwing revolutionary who is violently rejected by the workers he wishes to empower.

Nothing in Ibsen is straightforward and, as in his earlier An Enemy Of The People and The Wild Duck, naively believing that all you need is truth is a sure recipe for disaster.

Ultimately the politics gives way to the personal. Hope and heartbreak mark the love between John Rosmer and Rebecca West and, as this is Ibsen, a happy ending never seems on the cards. There are many questions and no easy answers in this masterpiece but there is much to thrill to as emotions once constrained begin to burst free.

Ibsen is famous for his revolutionary realism and Ian Rickson’s production and Duncan MacMillan’s adaptation triumph in making the characters in this 130 year old play seem totally real.

Also realistic are the set design by Rae Smith and lighting by Neil Austin which emphasise the claustrophobic setting and changing moods. Rae Smith‘s final contribution (which I won’t reveal), as the curtain metaphorically is about to come down, is a coup de théâtre that underlines what has happened and gives final proof of how much the design is another actor in this terrific production.

Finally a quick word of praise for producer Sonia Friedman. Again she has brought a play to the West End that might have been expected to stay in the domain of subsidised venues and, although she has used star names from film and TV, the stars are stage actors of the highest calibre. Commercial producers often look for safe, audience pleasers but Ms Friedman stretches and challenges her audience and, on this occasion, has rewarded them with an evening of extraordinary theatre.
Click here to watch the review on YouTube

SPOILER ALERT! This is a complaint about the publicity material. Rosmersholm is one of Ibsen’s least produced plays (although this may change after this powerful production), so audiences are unlikely to know how it ends. However, having seen the picture on the posters and adverts, they are likely to have a good idea as the play progresses.