Alice Birch: Anatomy of a Suicide

The play “Anatomy of a Suicide” interweaves the stories of three generations of women from one family. It examines the lives and fates of a grandmother, daughter and granddaughter, capturing pivotal, archetypal and distinctive events in a woman’s life. Its themes include the formation of family and romantic relationships, patterns recurring across generations and the mechanisms of relationships, loss, social expectations imposed on women, the anatomy of suicide and the analysis of sin.

“Ever since I learned that a woman is born with all the eggs that form while she is still in the womb, I have started to understand the question of generations in a much more physical way. It has become very relevant to me today: the experiences of our grandmothers live on in us genetically; the historical traumas they endured and their responses to them are still alive. Then I find myself wondering: what scars will my generation bear, and what political and historical marks will be encoded in children living a hundred years from now?” reflects director Uršulė Bartoševičiūtė, who is presenting her first production at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre.

Karolina is a woman in a conventional marriage who, after developing clinical depression, decides to die by suicide. Her daughter Ana, trying to escape her parents’ relationship and patterns of living, withdraws to a commune, where she reconsiders the principles of communal life and sinks into drug addiction. After giving birth to a daughter, Bona, Ana too soon chooses suicide. Bona, in turn, tries to bring the transgenerational trauma of suicide to an end and break the chain of such choices. She becomes a doctor and, unlike her mother, chooses a rational way to organise and understand the weight of her family history: she seeks medical and scientific answers. She decides to sell the family home and undergo sterilisation. Although she is a lesbian and cannot have biological children with her partner, Bona wants to eliminate any possibility of continuing this family line and passing on to descendants what she herself inherited from her mother and grandmother.

In the play, Karolina, Ana and Bona are portrayed at roughly the same age: they are all young women in their early thirties, and their stories are told to the audience simultaneously. The different timelines allow the life of one family to be seen 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, approaches suicide anatomically, as the title suggests: she does not judge, evaluate or justify the women’s actions, aiming for a certain objectivity in the storytelling. Birch says she wrote the work more as a score than as a play, allowing the creative team and the audience to view the plot like detectives—to notice and record the less obvious symbols, signs and traces accompanying this family, and thereby discover what each of us repeats without thinking, takes on from our parents and carries from one generation to the next. Alice Birch’s work is often compared with the plays of the controversial British playwright Sarah Kane; they share a similar relationship with contemporary existentialism, often