Delicious provocation from one of Britain’s brightest playwrights
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Donmar Warehouse ★★★★★
Alice Birch, increasingly a name to conjure with, has come up with a play the title of which is arrestingly non-committal. In fact,
[Blank] well describes the amorphous entity she has created in response to a challenging co-commission: a piece that gives impressive weight to the minutiae of chaotic lives while creating a panoramic sense of Britain today.
She was approached by two companies, each with different concerns. There was the National Theatre, wanting something for its annual youth theatre festival NT Connections, which creates new work for young performers across the country. Then there was Clean Break, the pioneering company set up 40 years ago to relay the female experience of prison and the criminal justice system.
Undaunted from this potentially irreconcilable set of needs, Birch has forged a piece with versatility at its core. Her finished article consists of a phenomenal 100 scenes, but whoever’s doing it can take a pick-and-mix approach, doing as many or as few as they want. There’s no requirement as to cast size, and the characters can be assigned names and genders as the company requires; there are no stipulations, either, as to the design. Here, director Maria Aberg uses a superb all-female cast to tackle 22 scenes over two hours.
That might sound a bit random, and also, to be frank, worthy. But Birch is one of the most radical and exciting writers on the block (she has contributed to season two of
Succession, this year’s must-watch; next year sees her major BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal
People). And, brilliantly, she unites the concern with young lives on the one hand and women on the other to pursue an interest already manifest in her blistering 2017 Royal Court play Anatomy of a Suicide, which looked at inherited trauma and female unhappiness across three generations. A lot is left to the audience in terms of joining dots and finding links, but the thematic thrust is clear: she wants to interrogate the way that we tend to look at female misbehaviour and criminality in isolation, without fully grasping the context, pressures personal and societal.
Which isn’t to say that the evening is about absolving women from responsibility, positioning them solely as victims, more about attaining nuanced understanding. The opening scene here has one woman (played by Jemima Rooper) criticising her friend (Kate O’flynn), newly infatuated with the man in her life, for being a neglectful mother; a subsequent scene shows a woman being really vile to her child for observing that her new male partner is abusive.
The evening offsets its potential bleakness with its constant formal provocation, the actors roaming a set that has the feel of a disconnected domestic realm, down here a kitchen, up there a room in which a woman violently dandles her baby. Out of the blue, against the scattershot grain, comes a long dinner party that moves from garrulous amity to tense acrimony, and perhaps offers the most contentious scene of the year, in allowing heretical thoughts about Metoo.
The party pooper – played by Shona Babayemi – sits with glaring reticence amid a braying contingent of her girlfriend’s coke-snorting liberal middle-class pals. Hearing that one of the number (Rooper) is in a documentary about the antiharassment movement, “Shona” goes blank. “The what movement?” she asks, to incredulity, questioning the reality of its supposed global effect and finally lambasting them for thinking they’re doing good when, as she puts it: “I think you’re making the world worse every single day.” That’s quite a fierce dig at the type who frequents theatres like the Donmar, but Birch is quite some writer. The fact that I’ve barely scratched the show’s surface is glowing verdict enough.