The Anatomy of a Suicide interweaves the stories of three generations of women in one family: the lives and fates of a grandmother, a daughter and a granddaughter are analysed by capturing the pivotal, chrestomatic and distinctive events in a woman's life. The themes explored include the forging of familial and romantic friendships, the mechanics of patterns and relationships that repeat across generations, loss, societal 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 are formed in the womb, I have come to understand the question of generations in a more physical way. Today it becomes very relevant to me - the experiences of our grandmothers are genetically present in us, the historical traumas they lived through and the response to them are alive. Then I wonder: what scars will my generation bear, what political and historical marks will be encoded in the children who will live a hundred years from now?" - Uršulė Bartoševičiūtė, who is presenting her first play at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, reflects.
Karolina is a woman living in a traditional marriage who decides to commit suicide when she becomes clinically depressed. Her daughter Anna, trying to escape her parents' relationships and patterns of life, moves to a commune where she reconsiders the principles of community life and falls into drug addiction. After giving birth to her daughter Bona, Anna also chooses suicide. Bona, for her part, tries to end the transgenerational trauma of suicide, to break the chain of such choices. She becomes a doctor and, unlike her mother, she chooses the rational way to structure and understand the burden of her family history: she seeks medical, scientific answers. She decides to sell the family house and get sterilised. Although she is a lesbian and cannot have children biologically with her partner, it is important for Bona to prevent any chance that she will carry on the family line and pass on to her offspring what she has received from her mother and grandmother.
Caroline, Anna and Bona are all young women in their thirties and their stories are told simultaneously. The different timelines allow us to view the lives of one family not as a random combination of actions and repercussions, but as a transgenerational chain of events.
The play's author, British playwright and screenwriter Alice Birch, approaches suicide anatomically - as the title suggests - by judging, judging and not judging the women's actions, in the interests of a certain narrative objectivity. The author, who claims to have written the work as a score rather than a play, allows the creative team and the audience to view 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 to discover what each of us unthinkingly repeats, inherits from our parents and carries from one generation to the next.
Alice Birch's work is often compared to the plays of the scandalous British playwright Sarah Kane - they share a similar relationship with contemporary existentialism, the portrayal of people who are often left on the margins, the analysis of marginal and extreme personal experiences - self-destruction, institutional dysfunction (especially the relationship with the medical profession), the portrayal of a woman who is overwhelmed, who gives up, and the portrayal of sexual and psychological abuse. The image of a woman who leaves her last words as a testament.
