When sadness runs through a family, is it inherited? Alice Birch’s skewering Anatomy of a Suicide suggests something more complicated. A sort of hypnotism. A transfixing of one generation by another. A daughter who finds her mother’s life compelling may vacate her own existence.
Three generations of women enact their histories – from the 1970s to the 2040s – side by side. They are so closely woven together that it is hard to know where one begins and the other ends. Does the suicide of her mother cause the breakdown of a woman when she gives birth? Does that woman’s drug habit steer her daughter towards becoming a doctor – and sterilisation? Words – “home” is one that recurs – and gestures echo between them. When a woman speaks of wrists, her mother (who has tried to slit hers) sends her hand pirouetting gracefully in the air.
Birch’s dialogue is as unswerving as it is in her Lady Macbeth screenplay, but more intricate. The influence of Caryl Churchill is apparent in ellipses and overlaps. But there is individual sharpness. Hurrah for this response to a woman who says she is sorry because her acquaintance does not have a husband. “What a funny thing to say.”
Hattie Morahan brilliantly vanishes. Her mellow voice is dulled, her limbs are angular, her features are fixed. All her systems are shrinking. Adelle Leonce gives a beautifully judged performance as her granddaughter: fervent but contained. Kate O’Flynn is remarkable: a bolt of unhappiness. She has arrived as a vital actress in stealthy splendour, not as a lightning flash. A knockout four years ago in Port and last year in The Glass Menagerie, here she is metallic with grief.
Taking us into depression so deeply means a bleaching out, and levelling of texture. The play is both riveting and static. Director Katie Mitchell’s distinctive trance style comes into its own. Between scenes, each woman stands like a mannequin, as clothes are slipped on and off. As if life were simply draped over them.
