Time has gone gooey but small events register with startling vividness. The combination of lethargy and stabbing intensity that characterised lockdown is probably the nearest many of us lucky ones have come to experiencing what it is like to be chronically ill. The American playwright Annie Baker is not the first person to suggest that pain is another country, something you can be “in”: for once, an invocation of Virginia Woolf in a theatre programme is justified. Baker is, though, surely the first to demonstrate the all-encompassing nature of illness to such extraordinary dramatic effect.
Infinite Life is set in a clinic in which normal life is reversed, as if in a negative print. In front of a mildly decorative wall, five women stretch out on loungers, sipping drinks through bent straws. They are not enjoying cocktails while sunbathing: they are fasting; some of them are imbibing chemicals. One man turns up but, hey, he is subsidiary, really there mostly to be ogled. Oh, and the youngest of these women is 47. Their age, which makes them unusual stage stars, and their free-ranging chattiness recall Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone, which the director of Baker’s play, James Macdonald, staged with the same skewering lightness. There is another echo: everyday observations and mild manners leap into wildness and tiny weirdness. One woman displays her colouring book; the man has a picture of his colonoscopy on his phone, which another woman wants him to send her. There is a terrifying description of physical anguish during sex. And talk of a thyroid camp for cats.
