Anatomy of a Suicide

I’m not going to get into a game of What Is Feminist And What Isn’t…

[*points at seagull overhead* — ‘Feminist’]

but the fact that so many of the Anatomy of a Suicide reviews focus on its protagonists’ circumstances without ever managing to articulate anything about the lives/deaths of women is mega-disappointing. They all love the play, which is heartening, but every response feels either superficial or wilfully stupid.

Billington, for example, ends up being right despite himself: His huge praise for Birch’s ‘gift for radical experimentation’ comes despite ‘concerns’ about the play’s ‘genetic determinism’.

(I ask myself “Does he genuinely think she’s trying to make a point about biology? About ‘the suicide gene’? Not about the actions of husbands and fathers and sisters and doctors and neighbours?” I read it again, hoping for a sign.)

Matt Trueman, finally happy to leave the house without his ‘right-on young person’ mask, questions its portrayal of ‘emblematic’ characters over ‘idiosyncratic individuals’, almost as if it’s possible to divorce those two things.

Fiona Mountford, meanwhile, ‘dislikes’ the way each of the three women is stripped to her underwear between scenes… No mention of why she thought that might be; why the female director and female costume designer and almost definitely also the female writer felt like it was an appropriate choice for these scene transitions. I guess she was too busy empathising with each character as a real idiosyncratic individual, rather than seeing anything emblematic in these portrayals.

[*points at Fiona Mountford* — ‘Not feminist’]

Elsewhere in the reviews — in almost all the reviews — Carol, Anna and Bonnie are listed in order of age and according to circumstance: ‘Housewife’, ‘addict’, ‘doctor’; ‘wife’, ‘daughter’, ‘granddaughter’.

Or maybe: ‘wife’, ‘daughter’, ‘lesbian’.

To Nick Hytner, who complained in his recent memoir that he “couldn’t see and couldn’t hear” during Katie Mitchell’s old NT shows:

IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE HARD NICK. YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE TRYING.

What was that line that Bonnie had? Something like: “Your glasses fell inside of her.” It was spoken to a surgeon — male, older — about a patient who didn’t make it.

“That’s not why she died”, he replied.

I can’t work out if my glasses have fallen into Alice Birch or if hers are somewhere sewn into me.

Anna reminds me of my friend Kristine, her voice so childlike. She is at her most grown-up when played by a child. Kate O’Flynn ages backwards, like a jagged tear between two women who were born a hundred years old.

I remember The Children, on this same stage, just months ago. I remember thinking then that I was surprised more women don’t commit suicide.

Carol: “I’ve lived in a building that’s been on fire for sixteen years… I’ve been crawling towards a window for sixteen fucking years.”

I feel sawn in half by this play. I feel my flesh grated by this play. I feel my ribs creak and ache because of this play. It has arrived into that particular menstrual moment, when I am tender and vacant and my whole body and my whole heart and all my fuzzy thoughts are paused and drugged and anticipatory.

I want to sit with it and close my eyes and instead I grow resentments, of everyone and everything that seeks to drag me elsewhere. I feel I need to visit Bonnie’s house before it is sold, sit in the bath and think about the women who went before me, their wounds ignored but their scabs picked.

In 3 days it will end and it will become another listing in a small handful of biographies, comma delineated and skim-read. I do not want it to go. I wish I’d seen it earlier so I could have seen it again. I wish I could keep going and keep watching, over and over until the rear wall is removed and my eyes see the daylight instead of the bare bulbs.

I feel like I have fallen into this play, or maybe it has sealed itself around me, or maybe it was always there but I missed it until now.

‘Emblematic’, they said.

[*points at seagull*]