Plays about mothers are full of tangled emotions and plays about unconventional mothers even more so.  Anna Mackmin directs her own play about mother and daughter, Beth (Celia Imrie) and Bo (Tamsin Greig) starting at the end when the mother has dementia and is in hospital waiting to find alternative care.  Bo is trying to preserve some of her mother’s opportunity for choice in the face of the requirements of the NHS doctors and nurses.

The backstrokes of the title are the way time is delivered in the play. Scenes go backwards in time to elaborate key decisions in Bo’s history with her mother.  Aged 40, after years of infertility, Bo is looking to adopt a child with special needs and she and Ted, whom we never see, but voiced by Rhashan Stone, find Skylar.  In the present day, Skylar is at a special school some distance away and her parents are phoned repeatedly and asked to come and fetch her.  So Bo now is mother to a very needy Skylar and faced with responsibility also for her mother and overloaded.