Beachy Head at Jackson's Lane Theatre

Beachy Head, the dramatic white headland of the South Downs, is one of the UK’s most notorious suicide spots. Every year a small number of people will choose to end their life there and it’s this, an attempt to explore this drive towards self-obliteration, which forms the subject matter of Analogue’s production, recast and revised since its appearance at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe (where I first saw it).

Two filmmakers, Joe and Matt, in the process of gathering footage for a project on lighthouses, inadvertently capture the last moments of a young man’s life.  He takes off his boots, throws them aside, and steps off the cliff edge.

As their shock gives way to fascination and curiosity, the two men find themselves becoming increasingly interested in this man’s story. They track down his widow, Amy, and with her permission they begin to make a film about his, Stephen’s, life, something she initially finds useful as a tool for helping her work through – and work out – her emotions.

The production hinges on the moral implications of their actions, or rather their inaction, as they fail to tell Amy about the existence of the footage of her husband’s death, something that becomes increasingly difficult to do as Joe in particular grows closer to the young woman.

The reasons for Stephen’s suicide remain opaque. He is glimpsed in flashback as an introverted and contemplative man, a writer of children’s stories, but he remains a flickering figure, half-hidden, a memory. The company never present a clear-cut reason for his actions, acknowledging in the process the difficulty of doing so, that certain things will always be unknowable.

Instead they turn the production in on itself, examining the very idea of making art about suicide and interrogating the film-maker’s (and indeed the theatre-maker’s) motivations in creating such a piece. The obvious reference point is Eric Steel’s documentary film The Bridge and this is cited by the company as such. It’s interesting to note that (according to Wikipedia that is) a film on Beachy Head suicides was commissioned by Channel 4 but never broadcast.

The production, a devised collaborative piece created by Dan Rebellato, Emma Jowett, Hannah Barker, Liam Jarvis and Lewis Hetherington, makes considerable use of video, live and pre-recorded. A screen at the back of the set is used for the projection of images – of the beckoning sky, of the cool tile of a mortuary; on the reverse of the screen is a mirror, which is used to shift the audience’s perspective and amplify the sense of aloneness as Amy lies in the bed she once shared with her husband. These multimedia elements are never jarring and are, for the most part, well integrated with the fabric of the production and the moment when the filmmakers’ desk, complete with editing equipment, is transformed into the cliff itself is a unifying and potent one.

The narrative is interspersed with scenes in which a pathologist (played by Sarah Belcher) describes her work, the autopsy process, the statistics surrounding suicide, with the necessary professional detachment. This sense of detachment seeps into the piece itself and Joe and Matt never really emerge as characters. Katie Lightfoot, as Amy, however, manages to convey a plausible mixture of shock and a dazed kind of calm at her character’s sudden bereavement while Dan Ford’s Stephen remains – perhaps inevitably – an enigma.

Reviewed for, small drum roll, Exeunt

Edinburgh: Beachy Head

A pair of young film makers discover that they have inadvertently filmed a man’s suicide. Reviewing some of their footage they see a man take of his boots, fling them aside, and hurl himself from Beachy Head. Shocked and also fascinated (“shall we watch it again?” one asks) they decide to track down the man’s young wife and make a film about her response to his death.

Stephen was twenty nine and an aspiring writer of children’s books holding down a mundane job. He was married to Amy and they lived, simply but seemingly contentedly in Brighton. He gave little outward sign of depression or despair and Amy is left feeling baffled and betrayed by the actions of a man she realises she did not know as well as she thought.

Analogue’s new devised piece combines video and other multimedia techniques with a fairly dramatically straightforward account of a young man’s decision to end his life and the repercussions of this act. The production contains several visually striking moments, but the simplest sequences are often the strongest; a brief flashback about the mending of a light fitting is moving in its ordinariness.

Dan Rebellato, Emma Jowett and Lewis Hetherington’s script is considered and intelligent but seems to shy away from truly tapping into the complex knot of emotions, the despair and utter sense of hopelessness, which might drive a young married man to hurl himself from the top of a cliff onto the rocks below. The key narrative hook of the piece ends up shifting away from Stehen's act towards how and when the filmmakers, Joe and Matt, will let Amy know that this footage of her husband’s death exists and how they are planning on using it.

There is some wry humour in the way the way the Joe and Matt fuss about lighting and the lack of a sufficiently hospital-y atmosphere when they are interviewing Dr Sampson, a pathologist whose job it is to autopsy many of those who choose to die at Beachy Head, about the nature of her work. There are also some very well judged moments: Stephen’s long drawn out final phone call to the Samaritans is particularly well handled, but other things smack of manipulation, especially a video sequence that shows Amy’s tears falling on the cards of condolence that people have sent her, causing the ink to bleed.

The characters remain rather opaque, though Emma Jowett is suitably raw as Amy, and the most memorable sections end up being those when Dr Sampson, (a measured performance by Hannah Barker, who also co-directs) talks calmly and professionally about the physical process of dying, the way life leaves the body and the frequency of self-inflicted deaths.

Reviewed for musicOMH