Theatre review: [BLANK]

The Donald and Margot Warehouse’s association with women’s prisons continues into Michael Longhurst’s regime as Clean Break, the company that works with women who’ve been through the Criminal Justice System in some capacity, celebrates its 40th anniversary with a kind of kaleidoscope of their experiences. Alice Birch’s [BLANK] is described as a “theatrical provocation” which, as written, is too long to be staged – the idea is that a director is challenged to choose from 100 scenes with unnamed characters, to construct a performance from it and in many cases decide on the characters’ genders and relationships. Maria Aberg is the director given the task, and she opts for an all-female cast, giving all the characters the first name (and in some cases last name) of their actor, and weaving a story consisting of several short, sometimes connected scenes, with one much longer one as the centrepiece.

So a prostitute (Zainab Hasan) breaks into her mother’s (Thusitha Jayasundera) house to beg or steal drug money; her mother is exhausted with trying to deal with her and sends her packing. We later see Zainab standing in the snow, trying to find one more client, before eventually an inexperienced social worker (Jemima Rooper) has to ineptly inform Thusitha of her daughter’s death.

Mothers and daughters are the major theme of the play, which keeps coming back to how the children of women who’ve fallen through the cracks are affected, and whether their repeating the cycle is inevitable. So Ayesha Antoine faces the realities of having to give birth in prison, a girl entering a foster home negotiates the ground rules with her new roommate, and Jackie Clune steels herself for the latest of the foster children she thinks of as her own to be allowed back to the mother she doesn’t think deserves her. It’s almost unrelentingly bleak with a number of characters’ pleas for help being ignored – Kate O’Flynn’s character thinks she’s found an escape with a new man who turns out to be far from the answer, while Joanna Horton turns increasingly blank and lifeless, finding a grim solution to her fears that her children will turn out just like her.

Somewhat lighter is the longest scene which sees that actors play very different characters (but still with their own names) as Jayasundera and Clune host a dinner party for their oldest friends, at which O’Flynn introduces them to her new girlfriend (Shona Babayemi.) Increasingly uncomfortable with their middle-class smugness, Shona punctures a lot of the beliefs they hold from a safe distance. Rosie Elnile’s set piles boxes on top of each other in a way reminiscent of cells, that only heightens the oppressive atmosphere.

To be honest I only booked for this as part of giving Longhurst’s entire first season a look; I still haven’t forgiven Birch for Porns Are Bad, M’Kay? and avoid her plays as a result (and just being reminded of that show’s existence meant I spent much of the evening quietly seething about it all over again.) Fortunately [BLANK] isn’t on that level, and is often very good, although the production and performances are carrying a lot of that – I did still find the writing heavy-handed at times, and while it’s clearly the point that the play doesn’t offer any easy answers, I also ended up unclear on exactly what the questions were.

[BLANK] by Alice Birch is booking until the 30th of November at the Donmar Warehouse.

Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Helen Maybanks.