Latest news with #Backstroke
The Guardian
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in theatre: Otherland; Backstroke
That crucial instruction to writers that they should 'show not tell', is even more evidently useful on the stage than on the page. It might be reworded as 'embody not explain'. After all, so much can be seen not only as it is but also in the process of becoming different. This makes Ann Yee's production of Otherland an extraordinary 3D testimony, a valuable gathering of information and a finally unsatisfactory drama. Chris Bush, author of Standing at the Sky's Edge, one of Sheffield Theatres's biggest musical hits, has, without writing an autobiography, drawn on her experiences as a trans woman to produce a twofold story that examines the particular question of what people think it is to be a woman, and considers what is it to become other than your accustomed self. Harry, christened Henry, marries Jo, an adored college girlfriend, before realising that a real life demands becoming a woman, a discovery that leads to the end of the marriage. Living as Harriet, before transitioning, she is greeted with wounding bewilderment from her mother (couldn't the person she thinks of her son stop distracting people's attention?) and with sniggers and insults – 'What is that? – from strangers. Fizz Sinclair's Harry is tender, graceful and touching. Meanwhile her former wife – Jade Anouka at full sizzle – falls for another woman (a beguiling Amanda Wilkin) and agrees, against all her former wishes, to have a baby. In doing so she becomes for a time a stranger to herself and her new wife. There is plenty of insight in Otherland, including the observation that foetuses are routinely given the dimensions of middle-class food: they may be compared to an olive but never to a turkey twizzler. Yet Bush too heavily underlines her significant points. Halfway through, the play's naturalism is briefly abandoned. Fly Davis's design splits open to reveal a murky pool containing an early mermaid version of Harry, caught in the net of men who classify her as a monster. Meanwhile, Jo, entering the world of maternity care, is reimagined as a robotic baby-machine. Throughout, an onstage chorus is put to just the use it shouldn't be, unless describing something undetectable. It tells the audience what to see: 'Harry's shoulders stoop as she turns in on herself.' Fizz Sinclair does not need the commentary – she is particularly powerful when suggesting suppressed pain and quiet withdrawal, which makes her final happiness the more buoyant. Anna Mackmin's new play, Backstroke, starring Tamsin Greig and Celia Imrie – who are two good reasons to see anything – moves through eddies of wordspin and whirlpools of interest. In tracing the coming and going, guttering and flaring relationship between a middle-aged woman and her dying mother, the play, directed by Mackmin herself, comes in myopically close to each scene. The dialogue is sharp but the action gets jammed. Ab Fab long ago dealt the death blow to the idea that daughters of the late 20th century were going to follow tradition and be more rebellious than their staid mothers. This daughter, Bo, played by Tamsin Greig, is not as censorious as earnest Saffy, but she is furrowed. Well, she must have had a hard time at school: Bo is short for Boudicca. Greig, straight-faced but with windmill hands, is made up just right by designer Lez Brotherston in unyielding denims and a bobbly capacious jumper that her mother deems 'lesbian'. She deploys her singular calm as an actor to appear both intent and distracted – pulled between her own troubled adopted daughter and her ailing mother; tugged by exasperation, affection, admiration and desperation. Seen at first inert in a hospital bed, stilled by a stroke, Imrie springs into full embarrassing life as she relives her days with her daughter: dependent, neglectful, occasionally affectionate. With flowing grey hair (shorthand for drifting wits), a fringed shawl and ankle-length dress, she talks about her 'dillypot' in magnificent, mad and maddening detail, informing her shuddering daughter that 'whenever your daddy went down on me' she had a fantasy about a hare. As she prepares for a few days away she dimples while announcing she is packing only one tiny travelling loom. Lucy Briers puts in a neat cameo as a sour-faced ultra-Christian nurse who dispenses aggression as if it were an act of grace, sweet-talking her patient as she feeds her the cherry yoghurt she hates. She is completely credible. As is the flickering emotion between the two stars – their very lack of consistency is authentic. Though it is clear from the beginning how this is going to end, shifts of feeling and slow disclosure of shared secrets make the evening twist unpredictably. The trouble is that when every small thing becomes an event, propulsion is overwhelmed. Backstroke? More like trying to do laps in a Jacuzzi. Star ratings (out of five)Otherland ★★★Backstroke ★★★ Otherland is at the Almeida theatre, London N1, until 15 March Backstroke is at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2, until 12 April
New European
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Review: You wait ages for a great role for a woman.. in Backstroke, two come at once
The play is essentially a two-hander between Celia Imrie and Tamsin Greig as a mother and daughter trying to navigate a way through dementia and advanced old age. Mackmin also directs a piece that is a well-constructed, very human, and, at once, funny and tragic account of two women who take turns at being the other's carer. It is the job of theatre to just occasionally put up a mirror to real life and that Anna Mackmin achieves rather wonderfully in Backstroke. Imrie in a role that could hardly be any less glamorous – she is hooked up to a drip in a hospital bed for much of the play – is on staggeringly good form, at once pathetic and terrifying in her last moments. Greig delivers a more nuanced performance – cold and heartless at the start but more understandable towards the end – and the chemistry between the two is a joy to behold. There are precious few great roles available for women on the stage, but these two fine actresses, clearly valuing what they have, make the most of them and they make this an unforgettable night at the theatre. Backstroke plays at the Donmar Theatre in London until April 12.
Telegraph
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Backstroke: It's a tough watch – but Celia Imrie and Tamsin Greig are superb
The chance to see Celia Imrie and Tamsin Greig on stage together – and up close at the 250-seat Donmar too – has meant that tickets are scarce for Backstroke, despite Anna Mackmin's play being flagged as a tough watch. Although the title's swimming reference is duly honoured and explained, 'stroke' is the operative word; the evening explores the distressing aftermath of one. Set those two names side by side and you'll likely think of comedy in the first instance. Aside from being in the latest Bridget Jones film, and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel hits, Imrie is still cherished as the affected Miss Babs in Victoria Wood's Acorn Antiques skits, while Greig is a darling of British sitcom who became adored as just-coping Jackie in Friday Night Dinner. Despite Imrie playing a critically ill mother called Beth, and Greig her beleaguered daughter Bo, there are aspects of the evening that play to these strengths. Mackmin's script jumps about in time, achieving an Ab Fab dynamic in its evocation of Beth as an outspoken, boho child of the Sixties – whose metier is woven sculptures – and her sensible, self-contained offspring. But there's no sugar-coating it, the core of the piece confronts what many of us will likely go through, and many of us have to witness: a medical crisis that renders a once autonomous adult incapacitated, and approaching the point of no return. A wail of ambulance sirens ushers in the sight of Imrie bed-bound in hospital, staring into space. If you're easily triggered perhaps steer clear, but catharsis may await too. Mackmin valuably catches the agonising shared powerlessness, and nigh impossible decisions on treatment. The obvious topical, and ethical, considerations around end-of-life care are only gently touched on, though, apparent most in Bo's recoiling at the issue of long-term support (this struggling TV writer has a disturbed adopted daughter to contend with). Mackmin's main focus is on huge emotional upset, the way we are borne back into the past during these crunch-moments – revisiting causes of resentment, and happier times too. The dramatic structure neatly mimics synaptic connections as it builds up the backstory, requiring the leads to convey their characters at different ages. But Mackmin, who also directs, errs towards overload. Bursts of flickery video convey a home-movie of the mind, but are distracting too. Stirring? It is, but running at two hours plus an interval, momentum flags. Even so, the production confirms Greig as one of our finest actresses – her deadpan features a surface beneath which churns so much; she can convey incredulity with a raised eyebrow, exhaustion with a sustained blink. A choked-up funeral oration achieves a wrenching sense of belated filial appreciation. And Imrie musters the complexity of this raffish, motley matriarch, who, when active, smokes at breakfast, dishes out tactless insults, divulges her sexual history with disinhibition and becomes ditzily inclined to malapropisms. A show, then, not unlike a domineering but dear relative: there's much to pick away at but much to hold on to and admire too.
The Independent
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Celia Imrie and Tamsin Greig play a mother and daughter through the ages in the bittersweet Backstroke
'Swimming pools do have a Pavlovian effect on people's bladders,' Celia Imrie chuckles to a not quite six-year-old Tamsin Greig, as the two actors float about an imaginary pool in the intimate space of the Donmar Warehouse. The Donmar presents the world premiere of Anna Mackmin's semi-autobiographical play about motherhood, circling a contentious and reversed parent-child relationship through the ages. Bo, played by sitcom star Greig, rushes to her mother's hospital side amid her dementia diagnosis and a series of strokes. Doyenne of stage and screen, Imrie plays Beth as a hippie Miss Havisham, with half-grey, half-pink hair and bohemian flares riddled with holes. Through a scattershot mix of pre-taped and performed memories, we learn how this topsy-turvy relationship came to be, with Greig playing Bo in memories that go back as far as when she is six years old. Beth, meanwhile, is fabulously bohemian, with a narcissistic, anxiously attached nature that fosters both a passionate child and a cynical adult in her daughter. Beth's preoccupation with her own liberation leaves Bo without the time or space to be a child. For the first 20 minutes of Backstroke, Greig paces about the hospital room where Imrie's character lies catatonic, nervously clashing with the supporting cast of nurses and doctors – and desperately wanting for a scene partner. To everyone's delight, finally Imrie springs to life, leaping from her vegetative state to their recreated kitchen table, cigarette in hand, feet up, suddenly regaling her daughter with stories of her sexual escapades in blush-worthy detail. The stage, cluttered with hospital paraphernalia and kitchen parts, acts as a nifty portal for characters to jump through their memories. Designed by Lez Brotherston right down to the cigarette-stained Seventies linoleum flooring, the set evokes claustrophobia – forcing the actors into tight proxemics to squeeze the vulnerability and tension from them, all the while making audiences feel the familiar strain of staying one too many days back home during Christmas break. Imrie delivers her colourful dialogue with devilish delight, even if at times she does seem to be grasping for lines. Her airy, elongated register contrasts Greig's punchy groundedness wonderfully. Beth's witty musings – 'I think poetry is simply list-making masquerading as art' – are undercut by crude barbs, such as when she compares her daughter's mouth to a cat's arse. Mackmin's script feels real. The characters are lived-in, no doubt lifted from the writer's own memory bank. The writer and director of the play grew up in a Norfolk hippie commune with her poet father and bohemian mother, who died following an Alzheimer's diagnosis. Memories intrude in tough times, and the play attempts to reflect this with videos projected onto the Donmar's back wall. As a concept, it is appealing, but in practice the heavily filtered visuals and edited audio verge on melodramatic, pulling audiences out of the story. Greig's performance in the second act anchors Backstroke. In between the duo's crackling chemistry, it's the moments of stillness on her face that capture the universal pain of missing someone before they're gone. Her ability to shift from sassy rebuttals to her mother's critiques of her weight, age and fertility, to tenderly wiping her mother's mouth as she lays dormant is gut-wrenching. Towards the end, throats thicken, and breaths begin to shake in the audience – before a scene change and well-timed gag bring on sensible British coughs and sniffs of emotional sobering up. For those familiar with dementia's toll, this play will ruin you. Others may find it lacks a certain, well, certainty. Is it about the innate knottiness of mother-daughter relationships? The value of memory? The pain of loss? It never quite seems to know.
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I'm in my early 20s most of the time… totally up for it!': Tamsin Greig on ageing, caring and learning bass guitar
Not many interviews begin with your subject telling you, gently and warmly, how they've mastered being unapproachable. But here is Tamsin Greig, on Zoom in the Donmar Warehouse's rehearsal rooms, telling me how this behaviour begins as soon as she's left the house every morning. 'I get up at 6.30 to walk the dog so that I can get out and be in the air to start turning my words over in my head. People who see me know not to come near me because I'm always muttering to myself.' Then she gets the tube ('a good place to learn my lines'), but admits she gets recognised – unsurprisingly, given her classic roles in so many shows, from Black Books to Green Wing, Episodes to Friday Night Dinner. 'But when I'm not speaking I have quite an angry face' – she raises her eyebrows slightly, impishly, as she says this – 'which I use to my advantage.' This has been Greig's recent routine ahead of co-starring in a radical new play, Backstroke, which opens next weekend at the Donmar. She plays Bo, a woman dealing with work, a struggling daughter and the aftermath of her force-of-nature mother, Beth, having a stroke. Beth is played by fellow TV-to-stage veteran Celia Imrie. 'Obviously, Celia thinks it's incredibly rude that she's been cast as my mother, but that's fair enough because she is eternally youthful,' Greig points out (Imrie is 72 to Greig's 58). Then comes her London run in Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea, which transfers to the Theatre Royal Haymarket from an acclaimed run in Bath last summer (one critic said she 'brilliantly conveys a woman calcified by misery', another that she was 'made for wit'). Then – keep up – she also stars in Happy Valley creator Sally Wainwright's new show for the BBC, Riot Women, about five middle-aged women forming a punk band, showing later this year. She plays Holly Gaskell, a retiring police officer who turns out to be 'rubbish at the bass but good at being in a band'. Greig had to learn to play the instrument for it. How was that? She grins, a little proudly. 'Well, I actually had to act a bit more rubbish than I've become.' She tried to channel Joan Armatrading, and … and … she struggles for a name. 'Come on, brain! What's her name? She's so famous!' The name arrives delicately on her tongue. 'Chrissie Hynde. Honestly. How difficult was it to remember that name when it was so easy to picture her? It'll be interesting to see if any of my lines come out of my mouth at the Donmar … ' Backstroke is another female-dominated production for Greig, with five women on stage and an all-female stage management team ('very, very unusual, and very lovely'). It's influenced by elements of the life of its writer-director, Anna Mackmin, who was brought up in a commune by a formidable woman and with whom she had no clearly defined parent-child relationship. 'I'm dealing with a human being who's very complex and wounded and an incredibly adept survivor,' Greig says. 'From the age of five, she had to develop a means of engaging with the world where she is fully alive but also had to learn to be her own bodyguard.' The play spans the characters' whole lives, including how memory suddenly intrudes in tough times, mixing in filmed sequences behind the actors, which occasionally interact with the script. Greig and Imrie play mother and daughter at different ages without costume or makeup – which means Greig has to act as a child. How does that work? 'What we're discovering is the more I use my voice but just remain faithful to the words that Anna has written, the truer the character is. At one point someone asks, 'How old are you?' And Bo says' – her voice goes softer, more precise – ''I'm pretty close to being six.' Just through the words, I'm that little girl.' Greig's childhood was not particularly privileged. Her father, Eric, who was 60 when she was born, was a stay-at-home dad (Greig said in a 2012 Observer Food Monthly interview that he was 'never able to show affection emotionally or physically', although he did bring her liquidised coq au vin to the hospital when she was seven, in an isolation ward with glandular fever). Her mother, Ann, worked as a secretary, and at one point the family went bankrupt, living in what Greig once called 'a shithole' in Kilburn, north-west London. Still, Greig loved being the middle of three sisters (Dorcas is older, Abigail younger) all born a year apart ('My goodness, we had fun'). She encountered Celia Imrie for the first time with her mother, watching Imrie playing overdramatic shop owner Miss Babs in Victoria Wood's Acorn Antiques. 'My mum was born in Leeds but left as a teenager,' Greig says, 'and then sort of transformed herself into somebody very posh and left behind her working-class roots. So when she watched things like Victoria Wood, you could see that she was smelling a different aroma. There was something there about her memories that I didn't have access to.' Greig's parents died before she was a household name – her mother in 2001, when Greig was filming the second series of Black Books, and her eldest children (of three) were two and one ('it was a very testing time'). Greig is aware that many people of her age are squeezed between caring for elderly parents and their growing children. 'And I am very glad, in a way, that I was able to be there to offer the care that I was able to give in my 30s, because so much is required of you, of your heart and your physicality and your mental agility.' She's passionate about end-of-life care. 'We can't be a fully rounded society without it.' But back to Imrie. She and Greig first crossed paths in real life when they starred in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel alongside Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton, staying in the same 'monstrously beautiful hotels – I just basically jumped on the tails of the dames'. Imrie prepared a welcome party for Greig's family (Greig's husband, actor Richard Leaf, to whom she's been married since 1997, and their children) who were due to arrive for a visit while Greig was shooting her scenes. 'She couldn't bear the idea that they were all turning up and I wouldn't be there to greet them, including my children, who were quite little then. I was so moved by her doing that. But that's who she is.' We talk about other things in our lively 40 minutes: how much Greig loved Nick Cave's recent Desert Island Discs ('I'm a real fan … he sees performing as a kind of communion with people … I feel like that with the theatre') and how some children seem frozen at younger ages since the pandemic, while others grew up fast. What age do you feel? 'I'm in my early 20s most of the time. Like, you know, totally up for it! Then I realise, of course, that after lunch I have to have a nanna nap. I mean, literally. At the Donmar, they've had to make sure that there is a room available at lunchtime for me to go and lie down.' Snoozing aside, Greig strikes me as a potential dame, given her stage and theatre credits to date and what's to come. What does she still wish for? 'To do a show on Broadway – which I've come close to a few times – and to let my face be the age that it is.' She loved watching Harriet Walter as Thatcher in the recent Brian and Maggie, she says. 'To look at an actor and think, 'You are so brilliant at what you do, and your face has got so many stories in it.' To see the life! Maybe that's my ambition, just to keep on getting older and older, challenging the industry to keep on employing me.' Backstroke is at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2, from 15 February to 12 April
