Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

You’ll want all the characters to die: Infinite Life, at the Dorfman Theatre, reviewed

Plus: a scruffy, slapdash Jack and the Beanstalk, with a Marxist prelude

Kristine Nielsen (Ginnie), Brenda Pressley (Elaine), Marylouise Burke (Eileen) and Mia Katigbak (Yvette) in Infinite Life at the National Theatre. Photo: Marc Brenner  
issue 16 December 2023

Infinite Life is about five American women, all dumpling-shaped, who sit in a hotel garden observing a hunger strike. Some of them haven’t touched food for days, some for weeks. ‘Don’t be afraid to puke,’ counsels one of the dumplings. ‘Puking is good.’ They pass their afternoons wittering inanely about nothing at all. One dumpling is an air hostess, another works in banking, a third has a job as a fast-food executive. Or so they claim. Each of the dumplings might be lying to the others but it would make no difference because nothing connects them, and they have no stake in the situation other than the desire to burn up time.

It doesn’t feel like a play but a prank staged by psychologists

After a while it transpires that the dumplings are not hunger-strikers but weight-watchers hoping to cure their many ailments by fasting. The main dumpling, Sofi, is troubled by an infected clitoris which makes her groin feel ‘like a blow-torch’.

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