Shaping the Unspoken: Mental Illness, Identity and Artistic Practice

Thirty years previously, Bonnie’s mother Anna grapples with anxiety and drowns in painful memories. She takes refuge in drugs and finds comfort in life’s little moments of beauty. Further back, in 1972, Bonnie's grandmother Carol tries to suppress her latent death wish within a suffocating society. She chooses the only life permitted to her: she becomes a housewife and mother.

The three women exist in different eras, but their stories are told simultaneously. The lives of the mothers and daughters echo through the family home they share, where they grow up alongside one another, fall in love, have children, and inevitably die. How can we heal from trauma that’s not our own? How can we free ourselves from patterns that pass down through the generations? Can love survive beneath all the hidden suffering we call ‘family’?

Anatomy of a Suicide is a revolutionary, modern play by award-winning English writer Alice Birch (Succession, Normal People, among others), that investigates how family trauma operates and probes its relationship to death. Following successful productions in London (director: Katie Mitchell, 2017), New York and Berlin, a broad team of young performers and designers now brings this highly acclaimed text to the Netherlands for the first time. This brand new staging by LENZ builds an intergenerational haunted house, predestined to come to life.

Mon, January 13: Frascati x De Balie

How can you heal from a trauma that is not yours? In connection with Anatomy of a Suicide, there will be a discussion with LENZ at De Balie on January 13 at 8:00 PM about the theme of intergenerational trauma. 

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Sat 18 January: paneltalk Shaping the Unspoken: Mental Illness, Identity and Artistic Practice

This panel discussion will mark the conclusion of the run of Anatomy of a Suicide at Frascati. The conversation will focus on personal experiences, artistic processes, and broader societal analyses surrounding mental suffering. How do you give words and images to mental anguish? How can art and activism contribute to a more inclusive society?

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About LENZ

LENZ (Marit Hooijschuur, Erasmus Mackenna and Roel Pronk) creates productions at the intersection of theatre, live music and performance. Dedicated to the underground and outsiders in today’s society, LENZ creates portraits of struggling humans looking for radical empathy in a hopeless world. Recurrent themes in their work are emancipation, mental suffering and lost futures. Musically, LENZ is inspired by genres including folk, noise and drone.

LENZ has been affiliated to Frascati Producties since 2021, where the collective has previously made the musical murder fairytales Sheath and Knife (Schede en Mes, 2021) and Katie Cruel (2023), as well as the modern, digital ghost story HAUNTOLOGY (2024). Early in 2024, LENZ received the New Makers’ Subsidy from Performing Arts Fund NL, allowing the trio to create the first ever Dutch version of Alice Birch’s acclaimed play Anatomy of a Suicide (UK, 2017) in 2025.