Naima Khan talks to Liam Jarvis of Analogue Productions about how to represent suicide on stage.
Film director Andrea Anderson has said that the concept for many of her films comes from a particular image. She revealed the image for her latest film Fish Tank was a girl peeing on a carpet in a living room. Arnold questioned what would lead someone to that action, and you could argue that interesting theatre begins with interesting imagery too. It's a point I'm reminded of when I speak to Liam Jarvis, co-artistic director of Analogue Productions, about Analogue's touring show Beachy Head, soon to be at Jacksons Lane Theatre.
The initial image for Beachy Head began when his co-artistic director Hannah Barker found a news article from the '70s: “it was about a telephone box that was installed at the cliff tops at Beachy Head,” he expains. The sign next to it read, 'The Samaritans always there day and night'. “There was something quite extraordinary about this image. It's dark but there's also something very kind and very hopeful about this direct line to people who find themselves in a moment of despair. We had a lot of questions about this place and about why people choose to go there as one of Britain's prominent suicide spots.”
Beginning his research by visiting the area, Liam tells me how the show Beachy Head began to take shape: “We were just thinking about who might find themselves in this telephone box and the reasons why. Then something happened: we witnessed the aftermath of someone having jumped. All of a sudden it threw into light lots of serious ethical questions. What would be the good of telling any of these stories? What could we bring to it? Why do we want to do it? And the show started to take a different direction and became very much about the ethical questions of representing suicide and the aftermath – the focus is on those people left behind, how they cope and the questions they have that remain unanswered.”
The show follows the widow of a man called Stephen who jumps from a cliff. “It's about the process she goes through in trying to understand why her husband did this,” Liam summarises, “and those strange ambivalent feelings of real anger and immense sorrow. The other characters are two documentary makers, who are working on a film about lighthouses when they inadvertently capture Stephen's jump on eight seconds on their footage. They're confronted with the ethical dilemma of what makes the more interesting documentary. What do they do with this footage?”
There's a slight element of art imitating life here and Analogue have used that to create a thought-provoking piece. “The documentary crew kind of represent us as a theatre company, with all our questions about how to put this on stage responsibly and how to treat the subject matter.”
Using Eric Steel's The Bridge as a common reference point throughout rehearsals, the language of the piece comes heavily influenced by the documentary. Steel's film looks at a handful of people who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and interviews the friends and families they left behind. "The thing that we found more extraordinary than the documentary itself was the director's note that accompanied it," says Liam, “and Eric Steel's very responsible approach. The question for us was why would anyone want to be involved in a documentary that deals with that kind of subject matter? But people do use it to help deal with it all.”
Still, suicide in the arts or otherwise remains controversial. Analogue found two broad schools of thought on the subject: “one is that any mention of suicide in any shape or form might encourage people to do it. The other school of thought is that talking about suicide is one of the last taboos, so potentially a very important and challenging thing to talk about. Our interest is much more to do with what comes after. How do you piece together a person who suddenly becomes mystified through this thing that they've done.”
He goes on to draw a similarity between the dialogue that surrounded the death of playwright Sarah Kane: “A lot of her work is now reflected on in the light of her suicide. But in many respects her work is quite extraordinary and her suicide is the least interesting thing. It's such a shame that her writing is often understood in light of that one thing that she did when it's so much more complex than that. We're interested in that complexity. When someone does this act, you take the memories you have of them, and you begin to question the authenticity of it. So when they said they were happy and that the relationship was good, surely they must've been lying?”
Research shows there are common aspects of what follows a suicide for the people who remain. “The question almost everybody wants the answer to is why he jumped,” explains Liam, “but it's not a question we want to address in the show. Partly because the real case studies that we looked at showed a lot of the questions remain unanswered. It's devastating for the people left behind, but it's the reality. I think there's also something about jumping from Beachy Head – it's almost a statement to jump from the cliffs rather than taking your life in another way. Perhaps it's its own message.”
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