Drowning by Numbers

Sex, death, number counting and game playing co-exist in Greenaway’s morbidly humorous and quite brilliant work.

Three generations of the same family – a grandmother (Plowright), mother (Stevenson) and daughter (Richardson) – are all named Cissie Colpitts. Each woman, with her respective husband, finds herself following a cyclical story. With the ever-present themes of sex and death, and the motif of water providing a backdrop to the work, Greenaway gleefully pays homage to England’s great pastoral painters with ironic games and a number count providing the narrative’s unconventional structure.