Beachy Head is the story of Stephen Mitchell, an ordinary man who decides to commit suicide, and through this play we find out about his death by following the movements of his widow, a pathologist, and two film-makers after it has occurred. The film-makers serendipitously record footage of Stephen’s jump off Beachy Head into oblivion, and their interaction with the widow and interviews with the pathologist (having decided to make a film about Stephen) forms the basis of the narrative.

The technical aspects were the production’s major strength. An overhead projector allowed for instant back-drop changes, the incorporation of previously filmed footage (nicely used in one scene to give the eye-view of the widow - Peep Show hits the theatre scene), and even different angles on the very stage we faced as it was linked to a video camera that the actors moved around the stage. It seemed to be a requirement of all the set-pieces to be on wheels, rotate to become mirrors, tilt from being a desk into a cliff, or have hidden compartments that the deceased Stephen could jump out of, facilitating slick movement between scenes , all coordinated by the actors themselves. Using a large piece of cardboard to create the illusion of wind, a time-honoured technique, was perhaps a little clumsy, though it was great to see the actors putting in all that physical effort, as when noting the production was by a company called Analogue, I feared that no issue would have anything other than an electrical solution.

There were many ethical and philosophical questions posed by the play; the physical nature of mind (the pathologist states ‘I can dissect a brain, but not a mind’), how sensitive issues should be handled by film-makers, and difficulties pathologist face when distancing themselves from what they do (over-done, but thank you for the description of how to cut open a thorax, it was definitely necessary to convince us of the Dr. Sampson’s objective outlook), to name a few. These were interesting, if a tad cliché and never addressed in appropriate depth, but the ultimate cliché of this production was that the technically brilliant Analogue failed to make us feel. The script was limited to awkward conversations between the film-makers and the widow, and scientific monologues for the pathologist. The true motivation behind Stephen’s suicide is never fully explained. He makes a phone-call to a help-centre before he jumps, in which he describes ‘bad days’ and wanting ‘darkness’ and ‘silence’, but at no stage is the real nature of his marital relations examined (we find out he loves his wife), nor any particular details about his character (his widow at one point says ‘he’s quite private’) or his work (he says in the phone conversation he has ‘bad days’) that could elucidate why he committed such a horrific act.

Beachy Head tried to accomplish too much. The production was too mechanical to successfully confront the heavy issues it took on, as to be able to do so would require more investment in the actors than what they act around.

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