In the latest of American playwright Annie Baker’s intensely humane and minutely observed situation dramas, we gain insights into the lives of five women undergoing fasting cures for cancer, Lyme’s Disease and chronic pain at a dodgy California spa.
James Macdonald’s understated production is exquisitely acted and contains a late contender for the year’s best line. Nelson, the only male patient, shows main character Sofi a photo from his colonoscopy with the words: “That’s my rectosigmoid junction.”
Mostly, though, it’s all about the women, who differ in age, ethnicity and life experience but come, by increments, to a comfortable accord. Sofi (Christina Kirk) is the youngest at 47 and the newest of the current inmates: we first see her interacting reluctantly with the oldest, Eileen (Marylouise Burke, wonderful), on a row of backyard sunloungers that cruelly overlook a bakery.
Sofi also resists nosy overtures from Elaine (Brenda Pressley) and Ginnie (Kristine Nielsen), but then Kirk steps out of character, announces that 20 minutes have passed, and we’re plunged into the middle of a conversation in which Ginnie is pronouncing on the number of sphincters in the body.
Another jump forward, of five hours, and Yvette (Mia Katigbak) is expounding her horrific medical history and talking about her second cousin, who “narrates pornography for blind people”.
So it proceeds. Sometimes a few minutes are skipped over and we’re into a profound philosophical discussion. At others, two days pass, punctuated only by a moment in which Eileen puts a sunhat on Sofi. Gradually we learn enough about the other women to understand their unknowable complexity.
About Sofi, we learn more, largely through the nocturnal games of voicemail tag she plays with her estranged husband and the lover with whom she exchanges fantasies that are never realised. Sofi’s endless pain is centred in her bladder and genitals, so sex is agony, and agony is sexualised, “like some punishment in a fairytale”.
The rare appearances of the terse Nelson (Pete Simpson), who automatically takes up space and is convinced his colonic suffering is worse than childbirth, disrupts the female dynamic and blindsides Sofi. He’s central to Baker’s ideas about the way we seek connection and meaning, but he and his painsplaining make the play less interesting.
I’d rather watch more of Kirk’s low-key solo moments on a darkened stage, and the delicate web of intimacy she and the other superb female cast members build between their characters. I’m also aware it’s absurd to say this: Baker’s plays are singular creations that march to their own rhythm, and we’re fortunate that four of them have now come to the National.
National Theatre, to January 13, nationaltheatre.org.uk
