Review: INFINITE LIFE, National Theatre
Photo credit: Marc Brenner
Following its world premiere two months ago in New York, Annie Baker returns to the National Theatre with her new play, Infinite Life. Keeping true to her style, Baker aims for hyper-realistic conversations between the characters rather than action. While uncharacteristically short compared to most of her previous work, her newest play still feels a bit too long.
Set in an unspecified luxury health retreat in America, the play is a slice of Sofi’s life (Christina Kirk), who checks-in in order to treat her chronic pain. During her sixteen-day stay, she meets Eileen (Marylouise Burke), Yvette (Mia Katigbak), Ginnie (Kristine Nielsen), Elaine (Brenda Pressley) and Nelson (Pete Simpson), all of whom are being treated there simultaneously, for varying lengths of time. While each of them suffers from different underlying conditions, all seem to involve various manifestations of chronic pain as well. As relationships between the characters develop, we discover more and more about their lives and their relationships with themselves.
The entire cast serves Annie Baker’s style beautifully, offering an effortless and - in the best way - ordinary delivery of dialogue. Each of the actors creates their own quirky, unique and highly specific human being, which is the saving grace of this production and transforms Annie Baker’s cleverly written, every-day conversation to highly entertaining comedy, with Katigbak’s Yvette arguably being the star of the show.
The facility itself, bordering between cutting-edge wellness centre and complete scam, acts almost as the seventh character of the show and is an astute reflection of the present-day bourgeoisie obsession with wellness and holistic care (also echoed elsewhere within the play) and the tragic brilliance of 21st century medical marketing, posing also questions around medical ethics.
Although great detail can be found in the personality traits of the characters, unfortunately the same cannot be said for the physical aspect of the cast’s performance. The text offers very specific and frequent information on the location, character and intensity of the characters’ pain and discomfort and, while not all pain is visible, the qualities of the pain described within the text would undoubtedly inform the way the characters sit, walk and handle themselves, both physically, emotionally and mentally, a layer which apart from a few somewhat forced moments, is just not present. This unfortunately breaks the spell of naturalism and takes away from the characters’ journeys, particularly Sofi’s.
In fact, pain in all its forms seems to be Baker’s main focus in Infinite Life, and her writing subtly but skillfully explores the multiple aspects of this underrecognised condition. Baker manages, through seemingly irrelevant dialogue, to capture the human nature’s innate need to assign meaning to pain, whether it be physical, psychological or mental pain, and to make sense of it in order to accept it. She also gives us a beautiful depiction of the paradox that is seeking out pain to relieve pain, and the different ways self-harming behaviour can manifest. Sadly, perhaps for fear of not being understood, Baker makes the choice to summarise most of the subtext of the play through Sofi’s short monologue in the final scene, which inevitably takes away a lot of the magic.
Ultimately, while the writing explores fascinating themes and the characters possess intriguing personalities, the absence of character development or transformative journeys fails to fully engage the audience in this play.
*** Three stars
Reviewed by: Erifyli Gigante
Infinite Life plays at the National Theatre until 13 January, with further information here.