Alice Birch: Anatomy of a Suicide

The play “Anatomy of a Suicide” intertwines the stories of three generations of women from one family. It examines the lives and fates of a grandmother, daughter and granddaughter, tracing defining, archetypal and distinctive events in women’s lives. Its themes include forming family and romantic relationships, patterns repeated across generations and the mechanisms of relationships, loss, society’s expectations of 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 begun to think about generations in a much more physical way. This question feels very relevant to me today: our grandmothers’ experiences live on in us genetically; the historical traumas they endured and their responses to them are still alive. I then wonder: what scars will my generation bear, and what political and historical marks will be encoded in children who live a hundred years from now?” reflects director Uršulė Bartoševičiūtė, presenting her first production at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre.

Karolina is a woman in a traditional marriage who, after developing clinical depression, decides to take her own life. Her daughter Ana, trying to escape her parents’ relationship and patterns of living, joins a commune, where she reconsiders the principles of communal life and descends into drug addiction. After giving birth to her daughter Bona, Ana too soon chooses suicide. Bona, 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 systematise and understand the burden 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 depicted as being of a similar age: all are young women in their early thirties, and their stories are told to the audience simultaneously. The different timelines make it possible to see one family’s life 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 excuse the women’s actions, seeking a certain objectivity in the storytelling. The author says she wrote the work more as a score than a play, allowing the creative team and audience to approach the plot like a detective story: to notice and record the less obvious symbols, signs and traces that follow this family, and thus discover what each of us repeats without thinking, takes from our parents and carries from one generation to the next. Alice Birch’s work is often compared with that of the controversial British playwright Sarah Kane; they share a similar relationship with contemporary existentialism, often