Infinite Life review: Annie Baker’s play about women in pain is full of small wonders

There are subtle moments of quiet awakening in Annie Baker’s play about five women sprawled on sunloungers at a health farm, hoping to cure their pain

Kristine Nielsen (Ginnie), Brenda Pressley (Elaine), Marylouise Burke (Eileen) and Mia Katigbak (Yvette) in ‘Infinite Life’ (Marc Brenner)

There’s a special way to watch an Annie Baker play: you have to abandon the wait for something to happen, stop expecting to be amused, be ready for meaning or beauty to bubble up where you least foresee it. You’d probably need a similar mindset to survive a quack water-fasting cure in the California desert, like the group of sufferers her latest play focuses on. As their normal lives ebb away, miracles occur.

Sofi (Christina Kirk) has imprisoned herself here in the hopes of treating a genito-urinary health condition – one she’s initially too embarrassed to mention in front of the older women who recline hungrily, uncomfortably on this clinic’s sun terrace. After dark, she leaves obscene voicemails for her lover, penitent ones for her husband. She’s punishing her soul, as much as her body.

But soon, unexpected comfort arrives. At first, the other women’s stories of chronic pain are background noise, like the distant motorway traffic: as Yvette, Mia Katigbak delivers a memorable monologue where she recites her health woes with impassive thoroughness, like she’s describing a minor but complex road accident. Baker’s writing is frequently hilarious, taking relish in the absurdities of sphincters and fad diets and competitive suffering, making laughter catch your throat without ever surrendering to neat punchlines.

Then, when it’s almost too late, Sofi starts to fumble towards meaning. Everyone’s making flawed attempts to understand big things like suffering, healing, and human connection here, leaning on half-remembered things they heard or scrolled past online – and groping towards answers as ineffectually as though they’re trying to catch a bird that’s flown indoors, and keeps fluttering out of reach.

In the final scenes, this always-stellar cast reaches new heights. Marylouise Burke unveils all the wisdom her character Eileen has been hiding under her sensible bucket hat, and Kirk turns Sofi into a pathetically broken thing, torn between the routine and the possibility of something greater, something transcendental.

You can feel the whole audience leaning forward, weighting this frail moment with hope and expectation. It’s an impressive feat Baker’s achieved here, in creating so much dramatic tension in a play where everyone’s lying flatly, weakly on sunloungers.

Christina Kirk as Sofi in ‘Infinite Life’ (Marc Brenner)

Director James Macdonald’s production, which started life off-Broadway, could do a little more to heighten the mood here – the blank canvas of a set doesn’t really capture the dilapidated, sun-drenched oddness of this motel-turned-clinic, or suggest the eeriness of its sharp transitions between day and illicit night.

Still, lean in close and there are so many softer moments to delight in, like the way that shirtless male interloper Nelson (Pete Simpson) provokes a subtle bodily response in each of the women here, defensive as something inside them starts to awaken. This brilliant play is full of such small wonders: gentler echoes of the miracle cure that each patient longs for, in vain.

National Theatre, until 13 January