Theatre review: Infinite Life

From the writer who brought you three hours of vacuuming popcorn out of a carpet comes two hours of pensioners sitting on sun loungers talking about their bladders: America's queen of low-key experimental theatre Annie Baker makes another return visit to the Dorfman with Infinite Life - James Macdonald's premiere production for Atlantic Theater Company in New York comes over with US cast intact, as Sofi (Christina Kirk) spends ten days (or thereabouts... her precise memory of her time there can get hazy) at a quasi-mystical fasting retreat in Northern California. People, mostly women, go there for extreme pain, life-threatening diseases or both, and if you believe Yvette (Mia Katigbak) the unseen doctor's combination of starvation diets and juice drinks have had miraculous healing results.

Theatre review: John

Annie Baker's playwrighting style can be at times understated to the point of eccentricity, but 2016's production of The Flick obviously found an audience at the National as her latest, John - even the title now understated and cryptic - also comes to the Dorfman, and to me at least feels like something a bit more special even than the lauded last play. Elias (Tom Mothersdale) was an American Civil War geek as a child, so when a road trip home after Thanksgiving takes them near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he persuades his girlfriend Jenny (Anneika Rose) that they should stop off there for a couple of days so he can visit the historic battlefields. Already much less enthusiastic about trekking through freezing cornfields than her boyfriend is, when Jenny gets a particularly painful period she ends up letting him go out alone, staying behind at the bed and breakfast with its colourful owner.