A mother lies dying in a hospital bed. A middle-aged daughter comes and goes. In between these last visits, there is remembered life. Celia Imrie as the mother and Tamsin Greig as daughter give immense performances, their relationship abrasive yet loving.
Imrie is the queenly, self-absorbed and peculiarly child-like Beth, who has an edge of Blanche DuBois. She is a nightmare mother, insisting on living with her daughter in university student digs and telling her all about her sex life. Greig breathes compassion into the stoic Bo, which is a challenging part to play: we see her across the ages, from the harried mid-life daughter of the present to a six-year-old learning to swim, a shouty 18-year-old, then later confiding in her mother about an abortion, a job as a scriptwriter, the adoption of her child.
Anna Mackmin’s play is about the mother-daughter relationship as it crystallises in memory but seems obliquely to be a study of memory itself as well: how and what we remember, in what order.
Scenes switch between the present to flashes of the past which sweep the women from the hospital to moments in their past – in no particular order, it seems. Also directed by Mackmin, the idea to enact the past as waves of memory is compelling but does not build to a bigger understanding of their relationship. The mother is dominating yet dependent, the daughter is unable to tear herself away. This dynamic does gain nuance in the second half of the show with shifts between them that are astutely observed and coming from a place of truth. But the non-chronological structure ends up obscuring its purpose rather than revealing it.
Lez Brotherston’s layered set encompasses a large screen (video design by Gino Ricardo Green) as well as a hospital bed and a kitchen where the past is enacted. The screen carries melodrama with repeating scenes that sit oddly with the tone of the drama on stage.
It only half-justifies itself in a swimming pool scene, late on, that earns the play its title and the metaphor of letting go (in life, in death). But it is both too literal, with flashes of Bo’s daughter, Skylar, and her partner, Ted, who are tangential to this story, or an abstract blur, with swirls and starling murmurations.
And why are some scenes played off stage, where characters remain unseen? Their purpose remains unknown, too. The play cannot quite commit to its raw and edgy tone either – where most scenes are quietly cutting and emotionally complex, there are bursts of sentimentality (a cheesy swimming sequence by Beth and Bo on screen, set to music, and Bo’s eulogy in the final moments) which bristle uncomfortably against the rest of the play.
Characters around the mother and daughter feel surplus because they are either too generic or barely there: a kindly hospital nurse is more convincing than the two-dimensionally hostile one. Skylar, who appears fleetingly, does little more than highlight Bo’s challenges as a mother.
So an unruly and frustrating play but also original and moving, which captures sometimes searing pieces of mother-and-daughterhood.
• At the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 12 April.
