Review Anatomy Of A Suicide

Anatomy Of A Suicide
by Alice Birch

Paper Dolls
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Some years ago TLT reviewed a sad but tremendously worthwhile book where the author, the late Siân Busby, traced the circumstances leading to a young woman's conviction for infanticide and its impact through generations stitching them together in a remorseless thread.

The writer. who had an equally difficult childbirth experience, was more than sympathetic to the woman convicted of a charge - killing her own baby - simultaneously classified as a crime and a mental illness and a defence to the charge of murder.  The woman was Siân Busby's great grandmother.

The book came to mind watching Alice Birch's new play about three women who, it is gradually revealed, share a family link and a predisposition towards taking their own lives. However, unlike Busby's book which discussed among other matters the legal characterisation of women, there is little of the social and economic context.

So anyone coming to Anatomy Of A Suicide expecting the title to be ironic may rapidly find themselves wrong footed by the two-hour play which, rather disturbingly to our mind, seems to want to persuade us suicide is an inheritable trait.

In Birch's bleak determinist universe for at least two generations from the 1970s through the 1990s until the more disruptive 21st century future, the outcome is inevitable.

Yet they also appear to be self-inflicted, all of which for us comes perilously close to first world problems.

It's true that, and this is not to trivialise, within the same generations of men, clothes hardly undergo radical change. While the women are like paper dolls, every now and then stripped down to their underwear and re-dressed by others, as in those days before computers when we girlies lovingly snipped on the dotted line and clothed such dolls with a variety of  pre-printed paper skirts, blouses and dresses.

Yet the problems outside their psychological state seem practically non existent - 1970s' Carol (Hattie Morahan) has no worries about her financial independence or her daughter Anna (Katie O'Flynn) other later financial anomalies preventing parity with husbands, which surely has implications even for the experiment in communal living in which she dabbles with her partner.  

The three lives do run side by side as in a split cinema screen or church triptych, with sentences and dilemmas counterpointing each other like an undulating musical ensemble piece. There is a light touch theme of property and jobs in relation to the women and by the final scenes it is partly through these that a cycle seems to be broken.

There is also no doubting the intricate skill shown by writer Alice Birch and director Katie Mitchell in interlacing the three shifts of times stitching together the three women, model-like Carol, Goth Anna and more clinical Bonnie (Adelle Leonce).

Anna played by O'Flynn (last seen, somewhat intriguingly, as Laura in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie) was distinctive for us, both for her performance and because her actions mark a more seismic change in the family.

But we can't pretend that this story, played out on Alex Eales's concrete gray set, held us for the full two hours without an interval where everyone outside the trio seemed so well-meaning, if misguided. Maybe there was a subtle political and historical thread (we're not sure), but, frankly, we're grasping at straws here.

All this  appeared to us to be buying into, rather than dispelling, a secular pseudo-scientific medicalised view of woman's biological destiny, even with the final gentle rupture.

Maybe also the title led us almost to expect an analysis through women's bodies and minds of a changing anatomy of Britain. However, if so, our pre-conceived notions, like the paper dress with tabs fitting perfectly the doll, were matched by the pre-conceived notions in the play and it's an amber light.

Review The Glass Menagerie

A  fine revival sheds fresh light  for reviewer Francis Beckett on the fragile mother and daughter relationship in a landmark 20th century American play.

The Glass Menagerie
by Tennessee Williams 

Lost Horizon
http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/duke-of-yorks/

Tennessee Williams's classic memory play The Glass Menagerie is, as director John Tiffany says,  "pure heartache and pure craft".

Technically it is a perfect play, minutely observed, occurring in one claustrophobic space. Small things, that are to make a difference at the end, are unobtrusively seeded at the start: the glass animal collection; the charm of the man we are to meet in the second act. The plot hangs together. There are no moments which make you think afterwards "I don't quite believe that".

In 1930s' St Louis, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, lives former southern belle Amanda, deserted years ago by her drunken husband. Living with her are her two adult children: Tom, who works in a local warehouse and hates it, but cannot leave because the family depends on the small income he earns; and Laura, the disabled and chronically shy daughter.

Amanda knows that the only way to secure her daughter's future in a society which does not value women, especially shy women with ungainly legs, is to make sure she is well married. When Tom finally agrees to invite a workmate home, it seems to Amanda that her prayers have been answered.

She works on the project of getting her daughter married with all the dedication, unselfishness and blind obsessiveness that Jane Austen's Mrs Bennett puts into the same project. In fact, Mrs Bennett, transferred to another century and another continent, would have been very like Amanda. (I mean that as a compliment, as I happen to think Mrs Bennett has been traduced by most people who have written about her, including her creator.)

And it is the actor playing Amanda upon whom this play hinges. If she convinces, so will the play. Cherry Jones convinces in spades. You can see just what drives her; what it has taken to bring up two children by herself in that society, and how it has drained her; why she is what she is; and why she is slowly, but surely, driving her beloved children away. Jones puts in a truly magnificent performance.

She provides several wonderful moments, but two of them stick in my mind. One is when she learns there is to be a gentleman caller whom she can hope her daughter may charm, and she suddenly sees her dismal, cheaply-furnisheed apartment through the eyes she expects him to bring to it. The other is when the gentleman caller arrives, and she cannot stop talking to him - or selling her duaghter's charms as though she is selling soap flakes.

Amanda is based on the playwright's mother and Tom on the playwright himself. Michael Esper puts in a fine performance as Tom, dreams clashing with duty, and Kate O'Flynn is heartbreakingly good as the shy, crippled Laura. The scene where her mother insists she answers the door to the gentleman caller shows us in just a few seconds the ways in which we kill the spirit of those we love the most: both women are slowly stifling each other.

Brian J Smith, the gentleman caller, is also a pure delight: an amusing, popular, handsome, thoroughly decent young man, wishing his fellow human beings nothing but good, knowing in the end, to his utter distress, he has only done harm.

John Tiffany's direction of the four-strong cast is neatly understated, but I was not at all sure about designer Bob Crowley's set. There was a kind of tower which, I think, was supposed to signify higher landings in a high-rise apartment block, but only suggested to me a castle in Fairyland; and there was also a puzzling dumb show.

But this is a small criticism. Tiffany's The Glass Menagerie is a wholly convincing, moving, sensitive production of one of the great plays of the 20th century.I urge you to go and see it. A green light from me.