THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
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Play by Annie Baker. A co-production with Atlantic Theatre Company.
National Theatre – Dorfman, South Bank, London SE1 9PX, until January 13, 2024
Annie Baker has said she deliberately chooses for her topics the last things you’d want to see a play about. She’s done it again. This one is about the daily tortures of ailing and aging bodies.
Her last three all quickly transferred from New York to the National Theatre to critical acclaim. The Flick (2016) concerned a motley crew of ushers cleaning a fading movie theater; John (2018) was a kind of ghost story where we heard long conversations between a couple of tourists and the chatty proprietor of a guesthouse on the Gettysburg battlefield tourist trail; and in The Antipodes (2019) we met a group of vaguely corporate types trapped in what seemed an endless story pitching meeting. All were unexpected, odd, yet totally captivating.
Baker excels at exploring the everyday in her signature hyper-naturalistic style. She has a slow theatrical metabolism, for her theater is a place of contemplation and the audience must bring as much to it as everyone else. She’s great on language, and how, so often, it is inadequate in helping to bridge true understanding between us. Her pauses are legendary, but they are never arch or merely theatrical exercises. Her dialogue is totally grounded and often, therefore, very funny.
This one, Infinite Life, is set in a rather dubious clinic in Northern California where we meet five women on a patio, lying on a line of sun loungers. They come and go from their treatments or retreat to their bedrooms, and they all appear to be fasting as part of the treatment. Slowly they deteriorate but their spirits and curiosity hold. They pass the time chatting or philosophizing.
The play is brilliant on the messed-up way we ascribe meaning to sickness (or “illness as metaphor” as Susan Sontag put it) and it explores with great sensitivity the crisis of identity and faith that this causes. It’s very perceptive, too, on the way in which women are so often ignored or under-researched and even preyed upon. The illnesses appear to be various cancers or nerve conditions, but this isn’t dwelt on. The aim of the clinic appears to be pain management.
The central character Sofi (Christina Kirk) is the youngest, at 47, and she initially buries herself in her copy of Daniel Deronda, but she slowly warms up to the other women on hearing their stories. Conversations that appear banal on the surface lead to the building of bonds among these quietly worried women.
A mysterious male patient appears, the silver-fox handsome Nelson (Pete Simpson), which alters a little the dynamic with the older women.
James Macdonald’s direction is quietly masterful in its lightness of touch. The passing of time is marked for example by Sofi intoning “90 minutes later” or “5 hours later” as time moves slowly here. The light changes and when night falls we are often peering into the gloom at who remains.
We witness painful late night voice messages being left by Sofi for a lover who appears to have abandoned her. Slowly she bonds with Nelson but it’s hidebound by their respective pain management. Baker is great at exploring sex and what it means to desire in a body that is failing you, something which never gets explored in drama, where the ill are always sexless. Kirk’s performance is beautifully nuanced, deftly portraying Sofi’s many dimensions.
The company are superb in drawing out the quirks and charms of these women, all quietly nervous about what’s going to happen. Mia Katigbak and Brenda Pressley are a greatly contrasting pair and Kristine Nielsen shines as worldly, affable, ex flight attendant Ginnie. Marylouise Burke (so great in John) is back playing, with great tenderness, the eldest and frailest, Eileen. She totters nervously, and we learn she’s a lapsed Christian Scientist.
The intimate connections of these women in a time of crisis builds trust and camaraderie and the simple hopefulness of this message is quietly moving.
