![]() ![]() Her credits include While We’re Young (2014), a movie in which her academic husband, Nico Baumbach, also appeared, directed by his brother, Noah Baumbach. Photograph: Manuel Harlanīaker wrote one episode of the Amazon Prime series I Love Dick, and has acted on screen. Sinead Matthews as Eleanor in The Antipodes. Did Baker see a similar imbalance in American theatre? “Things have changed enormously since my first play was produced in 2008,” she says. She is happy to borrow from another theatrical obscurant to clarify her own position: “I’m totally with Pinter on this one.”Although The Antipodes is Baker’s third play at the National in three years, for a long time, British theatres were scandalously short of women’s voices Caryl Churchill had a lonely prominence, apart from one-offs such as Shelagh Delaney. If you don’t know what’s going on, then I didn’t either”? So is there, somewhere in the playwright’s mind or laptop, the “truth” about what happened, or is it the case, as Pinter once said to me in an interview, “I’ve never deliberately held anything back from an audience. In both her cagey explications and the beguiling ambiguity of the narratives, she reminds me of Harold Pinter, and of Edward Albee, who, when asked what his play was about, liked to reply: “about two hours.” In Baker’s The Antipodes, we never find out what the business meetings are about, and, in John, a character’s climactic speech of apparent revelation can be interpreted as a fantasy or lie. When I wonder if references in The Antipodes to an off-stage character who found everything “offensive” might be taken as a reference to a culture some people think is prone to over-sensitivity, Baker’s wily reply is: “The guys in the play claim she found everything offensive. I think of my plays as incredibly political, but I have no interest in trying to convince anyone of anything.” ![]() I wrote this play before #MeToo and before Trump was elected, and yet it does seem to incorporate both events, and anticipate them somehow. “My plays are very much that,” she replies. To what extent does she see the plays as political or social reflections on what is going on? But, where other dramatists might specify the background, Baker prefers to allude to them. Audiences seem likely to take these lines as allusions to Trump, Brexit, the climate emergency and #MeToo. Characters in The Antipodes observe “how messed up everything is right now” and reflect on the “crazy weather”, and there are clear undercurrents of discussion about gender and race in the workplace. References to the external world are also oblique. I do think both John and The Antipodes start out as somewhat innocent-seeming and then get a bit more mischievous, but that happened naturally.” If people say my plays span or incorporate different genres, I hope that just means they’re surprising. “I guess it goes back to my resistance to rules and conventions. ![]() “I’m not really that interested in genre,” Baker admits. John has developments that could be seen as supernatural, and if a film is ever made of The Antipodes, different scenes could be classified as arthouse-indie and horror. One thing that frustrates her detractors but excites her admirers is her defiance of generic categories. I know at times this has frustrated people.” Has Baker had to fight for the right to be trusted to defy conventions? “I have always tried to make the kind of theatre I want to see,” she says, “and although I haven’t always succeeded, it’s obvious to me that, if you’re making a choice from a place of fear or obedience, it’s the wrong choice. An unexpected place … The Antipodes by Annie Baker at the National Theatre, London. ![]()
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