Tamsin Greig in Backstroke [Johan Persson]

ANNA Mackmin’s affecting drama explores memories and motherhood through a mother-daughter relationship.

Beth (Celia Imrie) has dementia and has recently suffered a stroke. She’s in hospital, visited by her increasingly fraught daughter Bo (Tamsin Greig).

Bo claims her mother does not want to be resuscitated or force fed and requests that her drip is removed, but she has no papers to prove it.

This rather intriguing subplot gradually gets buried under competing themes mainly to do with Bo’s troubled relationship with her domineering, self-centred mother and the nature of memory.

Mackmin, who also directs, explores their fractured memories – conveyed on stage and via segments of film.

Beth was vain and needy; she fancied herself a bohemian but was also a bully, forever commenting on her daughter’s appearance or weight. Miraculously, there was also love between them.

Mackmin tracks back and forth in time, and we see Bo as a small child, teenager and young woman.

Bo’s own relationship with her fleetingly glimpsed adopted daughter, Skylar, adds an extra layer to the drama.

Backstroke could have been trimmed. Certain scenes feel superfluous – especially those taking place offstage – and the ending is sentimental. But Mackmin writes knowledgeably about dementia, how it destroys you from within, and the heartache of caring for someone at the end of their life.

Although Imrie occasionally stumbles over lines, the acting is top notch.

Leo Brotherston’s set is wonderfully versatile and Gino Ricardo Green’s video together with Paule Constable’s lighting give a vivid sense of minds misfiring and memories colliding.

Until April 12
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