Christina Kirk and Marylouise Burke. Photo by Ahron R Foster.

Infinite Life by Annie Baker – National Theatre: Dorfman, London

Following a string of remarkable shows at the National Theatre, including The Flick, John and most recently The Antipodes, Annie Baker is back as perhaps the most anticipated playwright writing today. Loungers set against a decorative cement block wall (the set designed by dots) fill up with women who are all, we discover, undergoing fasting treatment for chronic pain. We cannot see beyond the unappealing wall, but the cast gaze out towards us and a view of what they describe as a parking lot behind a bakery. If this is purgatory, and metaphorically at least it may be, it is highly unpromisin. The ordinariness of the setting is a classic Annie Baker trope, where places, events and people appear at first glance to be of little great significance but increasingly carry a strange weight. There aren’t really any conventional events, just talk, but the conversations that ensue between the characters are powerful and compelling.

The attraction of Baker’s work is her characters, who often seem almost too real in the way they speak and behave to be allowed on a stage. Ginnie (Kristine Nelson) is in charge, asking the questions of new arrival Sofie (Christina Kirk). The relationship between the women on stage is full of minor tensions, occasional squabbling and kindness. Each gradually reveals the effects, sometimes horrifying, of pain that cannot be cured. Yvette (Mia Katigbak) unrolld a deadpan list of complaints that hits a level of absurdity which is both funny and awful. We feel guilty for laughing and for doubting her account of what has happened to her, because one of the play’s themes is the invisible trauma experience by women, whose experiences of pain and much else besides are disbelieved and discounted. There is a man too, Nelson, played by Pete Simpson with perfect poise as a ridiculous yoga-trousered, open-marriaged dude. He is very funny, but his account of his health, when it comes, is perhaps the darkest and most unlikely of alll.

There is a great deal going on below the surface in Baker’s plays, which makes thinking about them afterwards a very satisfying experience. For instance, Sofie is trying to read George Eliot’s ‘Daniel Deronda’, from which she at one point she reads out a particularly dense sentence. Is the book’s plot, involving bad marriage choices and outsiders doomed to watch from the sidelines, providing commentary on her life? Christina Kirk’s performance as Sofie is exceptional. She controls the play’s progress, forwarding the action with announcements such ‘Eight hours later’. Younger than her companions, she is both poised and nervous in equal measure and extraordinarily vulnerable. Baker, who has a quiet history of identifying and busting theatrical taboos, gives her a scene which is the first I can recall to show female masturbation on stage. It forms part of her mysterious sexuality, tied up and dictated by her pain where the border between fantasy and reality has melted away.

Infinite Life is a subtle play, crossing meditations on philosophical questions of whether pain really exists if it can only be experience subjectively, with the messy realities of life in 21st century America. It is charming, funny, raunchy, cerebral, tear-inducing and strange in equal measure, directed expertly by James Macdonald. When Eileen (a wonderful performance by Baker favourite Marylouise Burke) lays her hand on Sofie’s head as she is about to leave for home, she conveys the impression that something supernatural is happening – a moment of healing. And for the audience, it really is.