Anatomy of a Suicide

This play is a masterpiece. That’s that. I will take no opinion to the contrary. I will defend it to the ends of the earth. And it’s only the second most hyperbolic thing I will say about Alice Birch in the coming paragraphs.

*There’s very little I can say about the play without spoiling the plot, so I’d really, in this very special case, recommend just seeing or reading the thing before reading this. Seriously. I don’t want to inflect any of it with what I have to say. *

So.

Its narrative is fairly uncomplicated in lots of ways, which makes its unravelling remaining compelling all the more extraordinary: three timescales, Carol, whom we see in the 1970s, is mother to Anna, whom we see in the 1990s, who is mother to Bonnie, fifteen years in the future.

The play explores the way in which their lives resonate with each other. Scenes across time periods play out in parallel stage time and create echoes, linguistic and dramatic, of each other. Carol and Anna both commit suicide (we know this within the first half an hour (and the title, really) as we hear from successive children that their mothers died in the house in which they are staging) and the play leads us through burgeoning relationships, to bearing children, to the struggle against a desire to die.

It seemed to me to deal sensitively and complicatedly with the emotional labours of woman- and mother-hood. So many scenes play out these female characters being asked for too much (often by men) or being bothered when they needed peace or being harangued when they needed support. The women are constantly suffering as they fail to do what is expected of them: be caring towards children, being emotionally available to their partners and children, wanting to rear children, not taking heroine, not kissing women, children.

“Anatomy” is precise in its description. There are so many causes at play and as they echo through these parallel storylines, the complications expand away from each other – inherited trauma, structural oppression, postnatal depression, the anguish of having to reproduce – all echo and reverberate through each moment. Scenes push up against each other and lines in one scene seem to answer questions you have of another, lines echo an hour later and corrode the integrity of your memory of that past event. The past – I’m going to just hammer this home – literally infects the way you understand the present and the future.

Here’s the hyperbole. So, I was thinking as I sat there gawping afterwards that Birch is, I think, as close as we have to a contemporary Shakespeare. And I really mean it. What I mean by this is that the play’s first scenes are a wash: you feel lost and unable to parse the language, it seems far too much to deal with [it is – her brain is extraordinary] and you really expect it to let up. But as the play progresses, it in fact increases in density but, and here’s the Shakespeare bit, it teaches you its language. You start to go with it, even as you are aware that its going far too fast for you, o’erleaping itself and falling on th’other.

The play is so dense I think it might actually be cleverer than I’m imagining. It is richer and more polyvalent and elaborate than any contemporary play I’ve ever seen. It makes Oil, look like a kid’s show.

This runs in a line of Birch’s plays – and 21st century playwrights generally now I think about it, McMillan’s Lungs and Thorne’s Sugar Water being the two that immediately spring to mind –  that deal with the terrors of having children, the recklessness of that act, but this play seems the closest to finding its way to a really difficult and potentially horrible conclusion. The happy-ending for these people is sterilisation, to cut off the branch of their line to reduce suffering. The play neither censures nor supports this conclusion. But Birch allows us to glimpse the sketchpad of her most complex and knotty interrogation yet.

The production, directed by Katie Mitchell, is very... well, very Katie Mitchell. The cast are stellar: every beat seemed so carefully controlled I can scarcely believe Katie wasn’t in the flies pulling strings. And scene changes, in which the three women are not allowed to leave the stage but are undressed and dressed in front of us, hammered home the ways in which these women’s bodies are undergoing constant control within the world of the play. The sound design by Melanie Wilson was evocative and blurry and great.

But. But but. The columns. So, the play’s form in the text is three columns spaced out, in the way Birch has utilised before in other texts but never to this degree. And the design by Alex Eales just seemingly transposes this onstage. There are three “tunnels”, variably lit, so that the stage is split into three time-zones and becomes immediately legible from left to right. Which really helps us read what is, admittedly, a tricky play.

But the play is so rich, so varied and so deft at the textual level, the flatness of this presentation (particularly as the stage’s depth was limited) and the greyness of Mitchell’s concrete aesthetic, made the whole thing feel less claustrophobic, more hemmed-in. I wonder what is gained by this form, and what lost by not being able to vary the relationship between the scenes in space, not being able to privilege vision of one over another, not being able to push one forward, pull one ahead, not be able to place two close to each other and one far away? Which isn’t a criticism – I wouldn’t criticise Katie not on your nelly –  more a hope that this play gets another production that frees it up and sees how far one can complicate the play’s legibility. Just to prove Katie right and me wrong. And the reveal at the end sort of assuaged my concerns over all of this: the most beautiful light I’ve ever seen, really.

I’ve read a couple of review that talk about this play being tough or depressing. I honestly didn’t feel either. It’s difficult, that’s for sure, but it has heart and guts and so so so so much to say and do in your minds. Cognitive, dramatic, and gutsy satisfaction are very very rare, for me at least. This play is about as satisfying as theatre gets. I walked out moved to tears but competely enraptured and delighted that it exists and that I live at the same time as Alice Birch.*

Now imagine all the hyperbole in the world, it’s that. I can’t tell you enough how much you need to see this.

*I’ve seriously thought in the past about offering to do rubbish errands for her, so that she could just spend more time writing. I wonder whether someone did that for Bill Shakes? I’d like to think I would have done. God, I need to get a hobby.

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