TIL 7 July 2017

16
V&A Exhibition Road Quarter The Aston Webb Screen
© Hufton + Crow
ANATOMY OF A SUICIDE
Royal Court, Jerwood Theatre
In the trail-blazing footsteps of Caryl
Churchill, Sarah Kane and, before them,
Edward Bond, the current purple patch
of invigorating, ground-breaking new
drama continues at the Royal Court with
Alice Birch’s Anatomy of a Suicide.
It’s a tour de force in which a trio of
plays are simultaneously being
performed as we follow the misfortunes
of three related women – a mother, a
daughter and a granddaughter – over
seven decades. The narrative is kind of
linear, with Carol’s story beginning in
1973, her daughter Anna’s in 1998, and
her granddaughter’s in 2033.
The plot can be briefly summarised.
When we first encounter Carol (Hattie
Morahan) she has unsuccessfully tried to
kill herself by slashing her wrists. She
survives, has a daughter Anna (Kate
O’Flynn) who becomes a drug addict,
rehabilitates, marries a documentary filmmaker,
has a child, Bonnie, followed by a
breakdown during which she electrocutes
herself with a hair-dryer while taking a
bath. In adulthoood Bonnie (Adelle
Leonce), a lesbian and a doctor working
in A & E, is so emotionally withdrawn
she’s incapable of having a serious
relationship with either sex and for whom
procreation is a dirty word.
What Birch, in the course of her two
hour (no interval) investigation into the
nature of suicide is saying is not entirely
explicit though there’s definitely the
suggesting that suicide is hereditary and
can be genetically transmitted. Whether
this is possible or not I’m unqualified to
say, but would doubt it.
In the end, though, it doesn’t really
matter. Birch’s experiment with multiple
time zones, the over-lapping dialogue –
symphonic in nature – and her bold
attempt to tell three separate (but interrelated)
stories at the same time, is a
major theatrical adventure which director
Katie Mitchell orchestrates punctiliously.
Initial obfuscation soon gives way to
comprehension and while the play
makes unfamiliar demands, it gets easier
to follow as it goes along.
Alex Eales’s set – a bleak box lit by
three overhanging fluorescent strips of
light and dominated by seven doors, is
appropriately bleak without making any
attempt to delineate the play’s three time
spans. The same may be said of Sarah
Blenkinsop’s costumes whose many
changes (irritatingly so, it has to be said)
involve the rest of the cast stripping the
three female protagonists down to their
underwear before supplying each with a
different set of clothes.
The performances under Mitchell’s
clinical eye are accomplished, especially
Morahan’s, O’Flynn’s and Leonce’s. All
three women convincingly navigate, over
a period of about a decade, the changes
in their tortured, complex characters.
Not a fun night out, but a bold and
stimulating challenge.
CLIVE HIRSCHHORN
The V&A Exhibition Road Quarter opens to the public this week, creating a beautiful
and unique new civic space for London.
SCULPTURE IN THE CITY
Sculpture in the City, the City of
London’s annual public art programme
set amongst iconic architectural
landmarks has opened this year’s
outdoor sculpture park in the Square
Mile.
The outdoor exhibition will include
works from internationally renowned
artists including Paul McCarthy, Ryan
Gander and Martin Creed. Their work
will be displayed amongst some of
Britain’s most famous buildings,
including The Leadenhall Building, also
known as the ‘Cheesegrater’, and for the
first time, the Lloyd’s building by
Richard Rogers.
Black Shed Expanded, 2014 by
Nathaniel Rackowe.
For Sculpture in the City’s seventh
edition, the art works are spread further
than ever across the Square Mile,
including installations at six new
locations and range greatly in form and
scale. This year the scheme expands its
locations, with works like Daniel Buren’s
4 Colours at 3 metres high situated work
(2011), located to the eastern City in
front of the newly completed One
Creechurch Place.
This year, there are two new works
exhibited for the first time, Peter Randall-
Page’s Envelope of Pulsation (For Leo)
(2017) and Fernando Casasempere’s
Reminiscence (2017).
A six metre high sculpture of a human
anatomical model, Temple (2008) by
Damien Hirst takes up residence in
Cullum Street, and Kevin Killen’s Tipping
Point (2016), will map out an urban
landscape at The Leadenhall Building.
t h i s i s l o n d o n m a g a z i n e • t h i s i s l o n d o n o n l i n e