Alice Birch. ANATOMY OF A SUICIDE, dir. Uršulė BARTOŠEVIČIŪTĖ

Carol is a woman living in a traditional marriage who, after falling into clinical depression, makes the decision to commit suicide. Her daughter Anna, trying to escape her parents' relationship and life patterns, retreats to a commune, where she reconsiders the principles of communal living and sinks into drug addiction. After giving birth to her daughter Bonnie, Anna soon also chooses suicide. Bonnie, in turn, tries to end the transgenerational trauma of suicide and break the chain of such choices. She becomes a doctor and, unlike her mother, chooses a rational way to systematize and understand the burden of her family history – she seeks medical and scientific answers. She decides to sell the family home and get sterilized. Although she is a lesbian and cannot biologically have children with her partner, it is important to Bonnie to prevent any possibility that she will continue this lineage and pass on to her descendants what she herself received from her mother and grandmother.

In the play, Carol, Anna, and Bonnie are portrayed at a similar age – they are all young women in their thirties, and their stories are told to the audience simultaneously. Different timelines allow the audience to view the life of one family not as a random combination of actions and reactions, but as a transgenerational chain of events.

The play's author, British playwright and screenwriter Alice Birch, looks at suicide, as the title suggests, anatomically, i.e., she does not judge, evaluate, or justify the women's actions, aiming for a certain objectivity in the narrative. The author, stating that she wrote the work more as a score than a play, allows the creative team and the audience to look at the plot through the eyes of a detective – to notice and record the non-obvious symbols, signs, and traces that accompany this family, and thus discover what each of us repeats without thinking, inherits from our parents, and carries from generation to generation.

Alice Birch's work is often compared to the plays of the scandalous British playwright Sarah Kane – they are linked by a similar relationship with modern existentialism, the depiction of people often left on the margins, the analysis of marginal and extreme personal experiences – self-destruction, the ineffectiveness of institutions (especially relationships with medical staff) – and the portrait of an exhausted, surrendering woman. The image of a woman leaving her final words as a testament.

Partner: