MOTHERHOOD, FOR LIFE
Had there been trigger warnings they might add “extreme nursing” alongside the usual alerts about sickness, death, abortion and conflict. Believe me, rectal pessaries are the least of it in Anna Mackmin’s witty, heartfelt and, here, immaculately acted portrait of a lifelong mother-daughter relationship. It’s framed in the mother’s last days in hospital, and illuminated by video flashes of the past. Celia Imrie as Beth lies helpless, strokebound, her long wild pink-tipped hair around her while her daughter Bo (Tamsin Greig) hurries around her, driven by concern equally for her own invisible adopted daughter “Skylar” who has grave emotional and behavioural issues, three hours’ travel away.
Greig evokes that double midlife worry wonderfully, driving the nurses crazy in her impossible anxiety to have her mother’s preferences met, demanding the drip be removed and nurses not feed spoonfuls of yoghurt. She is resisted by a competently annoyed Lucy Briers as a senior nurse who is simply following the correct duty of care (horribly topical, given the present end-of-life debate). “It’s about choice! Her choice!”shouts the daughter helplessly, having years ago promised no care home, no prolonged death. But nobody chooses to be struck dumb by a stroke, and maybe Beth in her fogged new self was appreciating the yoghurt, and certainly needed the hydrating drip. Anita Reynolds as a junior nurse is sweeter, murmuring consolation to Bo about what she has seen of these final days and hours.
But several times in startling coups de théatre Imrie leaps from the bed, hurls a long raggedy devore-velvet shawl around herself and hops down into a kitchen set below, where the pair re-enact moments from their past. Beth has, as Imrie’s priceless comedic gift makes clear, been a “free spirit” through the ’60s and ’70s: hippyish, forever cobbling up multicoloured “art” on the loom (witty props!) and moving between male partners, irritated Ab-Fab style by her daughter’s more cautious ways. But always needy. We meet them when Bo is trying to break out and go to University and Beth wants to come too, with her light “travelling loom” to scope out the college bar. An abortion moment between them is revealing. Again we drop in when in her forties Bo decides to adopt a child (‘don’t be landed with one of the leftovers, a minus five” says the mother, fantasising about a possibly Chinese-Scandinavian grandchild.). We see one of the mother’s weddings, crowned with flowers while Bo stumps around in a ‘suburban’ hat. But from childhood memory, more mistily enacted on the platform above, we see a six and a thirteen year old, picknicking with erratic, cheerful Mum Beth, or being urged by the braver woman to plunge, swim and float free. (beautifully enacted, this). Between these flashbacks we are back in the hospital, with all the humiliation and fright of that world.
There is aggravation and impatience, but as the play goes on ever more glimpses of shared laughter, resigned fellowship, and Bo’s handling of her mother’s growing confusion. And we see the root of the angry moments in hospital , with the helpless daughter trying to fulfil the mother’s impossible demand never in her final days to be sidelined from her wild free life. Greig’s delivery of the funeral speech is beautiful, wracking, full of everyone’s regretted irritation at a lost mother’s ways.
Donmarwarehouse.com to 12 April
rating 4
theatreCat 