Theatre reviews: Beachy Head | The Interminable Suicide Of Gregory Church | Suckerville

Published on Friday 14 August 2009 20:40

BEACHY HEAD **** PLEASANCE DOME (VENUE 23) 'THE INTERMINABLE SUICIDE OF GREGORY CHURCH' BY DANIEL KITSON **** TRAVERSE THEATRE (VENUE 15) SUCKERVILLE *** C CUBED (VENUE 50)

IN THE fierce debate between hope and despair that is everywhere on this year's Fringe, the idea of suicide inevitably looms large, both as final solution to the pain of living, and as an ultimate gesture of defiance towards a world that inflicts impossible moral choices.

Analogue Theatre of London's new show Beachy Head – playing to packed houses – deals with a suicide that is clearly, in some way, a purely personal tragedy. In his 30th year, a young would-be writer called Stephen has thrown himself from the great 600-foot cliff at Beachy Head, leaving his wife Amy not only grief-stricken but baffled, unsure that she ever knew her husband. Around her circle Dr Sampson, the woman pathologist who performs the autopsies at nearby Eastbourne, and two intensely dislikeable young film-makers Joe and Matt, who accidentally capture Stephen's suicide on video, and who set about trying to make a film about it, built around footage that Amy does not even know exists.

As in their award-winning Mile End, two years ago, Analogue bombard their audience with a range of theatrical and filmic media, in swift and sometimes awkward alternations – driven by loud, manipulative music – that are frankly distracting. It's often difficult to know whether we're watching a show about suicide, or a show about the intrusive presence of the camera lens, and of other devices for framing and perhaps corrupting reality.

But Beachy Head also boasts some wonderful acting – notably from Emma Jowett as the grieving Amy, and Hannah Barker as Dr Sampson – as well as a strong and thoughtful script by Dan Rebellato, Emma Jowett and Lewis Hetherington; and if its style is sometimes too self-consciously postmodern, it's still vivid, accomplished and – in its filmic way – intensely theatrical.

As both playwright and stand-up comic, Daniel Kitson is notoriously gentle in his commentary on British – or rather English – society. He sees the pain, loneliness and sense of failure endured by many ordinary, not-so-beautiful people in sharp-elbowed times; and also the sudden moments of joy that can sometimes surprise us none the less. His latest 90-minute dramatic monologue, The Interminable Suicide Of Gregory Church, is an inspired fictional anecdote that flowers into an unobtrusive masterpiece of modern low-key storytelling, funny, poignant, richly observant of the small-town world Kitson's characters inhabit, and often quite brilliant in its precise use of language to conjure up the tone of a whole society.

The play's story concerns one Gregory Church, a man in his mid-50s who – one day in the 1980s – decides to take his own life; but first writes 57 letters to various friends and contacts tying up the business of his life. Before Gregory can complete the list, though, replies to the first few letters begin to arrive; and so starts a cycle of letters and responses, which keeps Gregory increasingly happily alive for the next 25 years.

Essentially, Kitson's show is an infinitely valuable chronicle of the small, rich, warm, human exchanges that make a middle-aged life worth living, saved from sentimentality by the sheer tragicomic sharpness of its language. And in the end, the fictional version of Kitson who finds Gregory's letters becomes a real warrior for his own upbeat interpretation of Gregory's life; as if the story of this village hero represented some kind of vindication of all those who sometimes despair of their ageing, imperfect lives, but none the less find the strength to carry on.

If you want to see a swift, sharp, youthful meditation on the enduring suicide image of bodies falling from high buildings, though, you could do much worse than spend 45 minutes at Spitting Distance's Suckerville.

Inspired by the images of New York traders and bankers throwing themselves from skyscrapers during the 1929 financial crash, this self-consciously impressionistic show uses live video and historic images, as well as live action and music, to conjure up a series of meditations on how, in tough times, people can fall through the net of society into different kinds of oblivion.

At the moment, it looks like a work-in-progress, but there's a real will here to engage with the social forces that often underlie our apparently private crises; and in a culture that so ardently tries to depoliticise and privatise pain, that willingness is welcome.

&#149 Beachy Head until 30 August. Today 5:25pm. The Interminable Suicide Of Gregory Church By Daniel Kitson until 30 August. Today 10:15pm. Suckerville until 31 August. Today 7:10pm.