(seen at the afternoon performance on 1st March 2025)
There are two themes running through this. The first is overt. Anna Mackmin may have had personal experience of the healthcare system for the terminally ill. If so, compared to the monkey’s own experience, it was sadly a poor one.
It found around 70% accurate. The rest, nurses taking healthcare decisions from the family and how care home transfer works, is dangerously misleading and should be cut in order to spare trauma for audience members who may face the situation and think Mackmin’s words are the truth. In fact, the hospital would be placed into “special measures” and staff prosecuted if they really behaved that way.
Second theme, the motherhood relationship that mothers hand down to daughters, who in turn hand down to daughters, is so murky that the monkey only discovered that was a key theme when reading the programme on the tube home.
The author does not assist herself in her directing endeavours either by constructing a flashback script, featuring the cliches of a bed-ridden final three weeks, scenes with teenage version, 30-something and mature daughter and a video screen of what is going on in said daughter’s head.
Had Mackmin chosen a single idea and edited down to around a 90-minute running time, and video been unavailable (it's often a lazy cop-out, the monkey finds), the result would probably have been far stronger.
That said, Lez Brotherston comes up with an ingenious set design, hospital bed raised, family kitchen and Aga on the floor in front to play the flashbacks. Death looms over us, memory and thoughts are high above, sometimes revealed as the screen rises on an extra performance space.
The cast, too, mostly rise to the occasion. Celia Imrie as dying hippie Beth trips over some of her lines but leaves us in no doubt that her chaotic life has impacted massively on her daughter.
Tamsin Greig as daughter Bo carries the play as she does the scars of mothering and her family (with difficult adopted daughter). It’s a deep performance that the monkey only realised after reading, as it mentioned, what she was supposed to be presenting to us outside the hospital setting.
Sadly, the healthcare team are stereotypes as written, but played well. Lucy Briers as nurse Carol, spiky and mis-informed but caring, contrasting with Anita Reynolds as Jill – the Black nurse everyone expects and will indeed find every time in healthcare, bless every one like her. Compassion, competence and reassuring.
Georgina Rich as consultant Paulina should probably have her medical licence withdrawn for brisk and unfailingly inaccurate reactions to every situation, but that it provokes the feeling in the watching audience underlines the sound work.
A single speech about people choosing to die when family are not around is the high point. It resonates because it is true, indeed backed up by a US university clinical study.
With a few almost as powerful lesser flashes during the performance indicating how this play might have been with an edit, what we do have is never less than involving but ultimately never quite floats as intended.
