Anomaly

Anomaly is composed of three stories that deal with the conflict between a child and a parent, a human and an animal, and nature and civilization. One of the stories is fictive, one is loosely based on actual events or a version of actual events, and one is as fully based on reality as possible. The play’s individual stories often unravel simultaneously and come together at the end. Of the three, the last mentioned is a story of the English Peter Connelly, of whom the press first talked about as Baby P. His own mother, the mother’s boyfriend and his brother abused this baby to death in August 2007, when Peter was less than one and a half years old. The play traces the major events in Baby P’s story, trying to trace the logic why all the adults around him so tragically failed him. The story which is only loosely based on historical events is that of the famous Indian feral children Amala and Kamala, who were found in a forest in 1920. It is unclear whether their story is actually true, and the play invents much, taking their story all the way to the London of the 2000s, where Kamala, now diagnosed autistic, is locked into an insane asylum. The third story of the play follows a flight attendant, a 40-something Finnish woman who works for a low-cost airline that flies between Helsinki, London and Kolkata. On one of her trips she has a brief sexual encounter and finds herself pregnant. Her doctor tells her that the child has Down’s syndrome and recommends abortion. The flight attendant nevertheless decides to give birth to the child and then give the baby away. After giving birth, she never returns to Finland, and instead keeps flying, hoping to eventually be swallowed by a black hole. At the end of the play, all the main characters of the play come together in one final flight.