Desperation Bingo // Creative Electric

It is brave to incorporate a game of chance like bingo within a show that has a serious message, but Creative Electric manage it well with a pair of camp, confident hosts. Eyes down, dabbers ready... The audience is playing, but there are also three 'contestants' who respond to each called number with a fact about themselves based on that number. It might be something that happened when they were that age, or something they bought for that amount of money, or the number of years they've been taking medication to treat their anxiety.

The audience can win prizes in the first two rounds, even as the information we learn about the contestants' characters gets more personal and more desperate. By the third round, it is clear that the point is to rage at the deadly impacts of the current government's austerity policies in the UK. A case here in Leith is mentioned, in which a local man died by suicide and the coroner said the trigger had been the decision of the Department of Work and Pensions to rule him fit for work, in spite of contrary assessments by his GP and psychologists.

Unlike Kaleider's Money, seen in Edinburgh in 2015, which asked the audience to agree on how to spend a pot of money, Desperation Bingo culminates in the opportunity for one audience member to win £82. The prize is the weekly benefits of the final contestant's mother, which she is at risk of losing now that her Disability Living Allowance has been replaced by an opportunity to apply for Personal Independence Payments. Last night the audience member declined, and it would be interesting to know whether anyone has ever, with an actor shouting 'You are Iain Duncan Smith; you are the Tory government', dared take the money.

- Michael Regnier

Links relevant to this diagnosis: 

Desperation Bingo - Creative Electric

The Money | Kaleider - British Council Edinburgh Showcase 2015

What Is Austerity? - The Economist 

GP's Report Was Ignored During Assessment - Pulse

Life and Death Under Austerity - Mosaic

Personal Independence Payment (PIP)

The Samaritans - How to Get Help

EVERY DAY I WAKE UP HOPEFUL // Christian Talbot

It’s one the enduring footballing cliches, parked somewhere alongside “a game of two halves” and the absurdist non-sequitur “sick as a parrot”: “it’s the hope that kills you”. Like all good cliches it invites you to consider an alternative, a refashioning, a making new. John Patrick Higgins’ Every Day I Wake Up Hopeful is an attempt at just such a refashioning. 

Its cousin cliche is the idea of “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory”. The falling at the final hurdle when success seems assured. It’s the sense that no matter how propitious the current, no matter how favourable the circumstances, failure is as inevitable as night bleeding into day. Why bother at all? What if the goal that’s agonisingly fallen short of, night after night, is one that can’t be reversed? What if the ultimate, unrealisable victory is in self-annihilation?

For Higgins, and for Malachy (played with hangdog sensitivity by Christian Talbot) hope is the impediment. The current running throughout Malachy’s undistinguished life and his equally undistinguished prospective death (a blunt razor blade belonging to his dead father, a last meal of KFC and a litre of mid-range supermarket white wine) is a Beckettian belief that the only thing better than dying is never having been born at all. Yet it’s not clear that Malachy fully believes his own rhetoric. He stays alive, after all.  

There’s a bit of Larkin, too. For Malachy, as for Larkin, “life is first boredom, then fear”. In this instance, it’s a fear born out of being haunted at the noteless suicide of his much younger partner Skye (“a fucking stupid name, but she was Australian”). It’s a fear that his comfortable, undistinguished life isn’t a subversive comment on the fruitless vanity of others, but just a sad, flabby waste. It’s a suspicion fuelled by self-pity and acute self-knowledge. That’s what makes the play such an effective comment on suicide, its acknowledgement that humans are seldom rational actors, particularly in the matter of life and death decisions. In the end, as Malachy observes, “it’s the fucking hope that gets you”.

- FG

Every Day I Wake Up Hopeful played at Sweet Grassmarket - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/every-day-i-wake-up-hopeful

From Beckett to Stoppard: Existentialism, Death, and Absurdity- http://home.sprintmail.com/~lifeform/beckstop.html

The Silent Epidemic of Male Suicide- http://www.bcmj.org/articles/silent-epidemic-male-suicide

Existential Stress, Anxiety and Meaning Making in Your Life- http://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/anxiety-schmanxiety/2015/04/existential-anxiety-stress-and-meaning-making-in-your-life/

Have Men Been Let Down Over Mental Health?- https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2016/may/18/men-suicide-mental-health

The Mind in Solitude: An Interview With Claire Louise-Bennet- http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/tag/samuel-beckett/

A DREAM OF DYING // Fake Escape Theatre

Life is just a matter of appropriate planning. A good life is a well ordered life. The fullest life is the most neatly divided life. Birth, school (“with outstanding grades”), a lucrative job, a beautiful wife, a spacious suburban house, grinning suburban children, early retirement, grinning suburban grandchildren, a cheerful death and a well peopled funeral. It’s so simple, so simply broken down.

All that’s known of the ‘real’ Peter Bergmann is that he spent the last few days of his life in 2009 in the Irish city, Sligo. Every possible step had been taken to eradicate any clues relating to his identity. No tags on his clothes. No identification. No personal effects. No traces of a life. Even the name was an alias. It endures to this day, a mystery unresolved and apparently unresolvable.

Treasa Nealon’s script seeks to provide something approaching context to this strange, poignant tale. Lawrence Boothman’s performance as Bergman is pitched at a hypersensitive frequency, at turns vaudevillian, needy, broadly comic, shatteringly fragile and wildly allusive (there are strains of Yeats and Beckett throughout). 

As an audience we are treated to a spectacle at once manic and potentially hallucinatory. Boothman’s performance and multi-angled characterisation leaves it unclear whether the memories of family life and friendship are real or the projected fragments of an unhealthy mind. It plays with our ideas about self-determination and agency. The illusion of life being a simply ordered thing is supplanted by the realisation that the only real control we have is over our deaths. It’s not just a dramatic concern, but one that we deal with directly (and indirectly) in our society. It’s the question of the ‘right’ to die, and the question what significance an unexamined, ‘unmourned’ death has in comparison to conventional notions of dying as an event.

- FG

A Dream of Dying played at theSpace @ Surgeon's Hall - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/dream-of-dying

Loneliness Swallowed Me Up- https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/may/28/emily-white-loneliness

Life-hating Loneliness- https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/suffer-the-children/201303/life-halting-loneliness

Sense and Nonsense: an essay dealing with the ethics of schizophrenia research- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920996498001285

 A short essay on the mystery of mental illness- http://noelbell.net/resources/world-mental-health-day-resources/the-mystery-of-mental-illness/

Self-Determination: A Buffer Against Suicide Ideation- http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2012-Bureau_SaLTB.pdf

THREE JUMPERS // Unearthed Theatre

A council worker watches on as a young man takes a running jump to throw himself off a bridge. He pulls back at the last moment. The young man, elegantly dressed, starts to converse with the dry witted street sweeper and the tone shifts. Things are revealed to be more complicated, as things often are.

Soon we are joined by two others and a queue forms at the bridge. A queue of suicides. They start to squabble and confer and details start to drip down to form a patchwork of connections. Unemployment, childlessness, the absence or death of love. The mutual connection through one female character.

Three Jumpers treats suicide as something more than just a one-off kind of ultimate madness, or a sudden burst towards self-annihilation. It shows the sometimes farcical, even grimly humorous faces of self-loathing and depression. It’s all in the conversation- after all, isn’t the absence of dialogue, the feeling that internal suffering is something to be born stoically and alone, that one of the biggest factors in suicide being the biggest killer of young men. It’s not that the conversations are flawless. They are often stilted and spiteful, yet strangely fluent in the way that desperate peoples conversations often are.

The play unfurls like a morality play without a moralising streak. Through its humor and subtlety it shows suicidal tendencies not as aberrations, but part of the complexity that constitutes being human.

- FG

Three Jumpers played at Greenside @ Infirmary Street - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/three-jumpers

Self-Determination: A Buffer Against Suicide Ideation- http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2012-Bureau_SaLTB.pdf

From Beckett to Stoppard: Existentialism, Death, and Absurdity- http://home.sprintmail.com/~lifeform/beckstop.html

An Essay on Influence in Waiting for Godot- http://www.samuel-beckett.net/Penelope/influences_resonances.html

Campaign Against Living Miserably- https://www.thecalmzone.net/

5 OUT OF 10 MEN // Deep Diving Ensemble

Male suicide is at epidemic proportions, the leading cause of death for men between 20 and 34 in England and Wales, an undiscussed wave of futile waste. Like mental health provisions across the UK, support for young men has been eroded, and the new societies of the 21st century have less use for the strong, silent and stoic men still lionised by those who advocate ‘traditional values’ and roles. The idea of a man is changing, whilst the ideal takes time to catch up.
 
Sometimes it seems the most common place to see these statistics are when they are needlessly weaponised, used by clueless men’s rights advocates as evidence of feminist blind spots, without acknowledging the potential of gender equality to fix the underlying causes of the pain and suffering. Men who are told not to cry, not to express emotions, to sublimate their desires into unhealthy outlets and to never show weakness. Boys who grow up with stilted relationships to their own feelings, and shame with their inability to fix it. Remember how normal it is that boys are told to not act ‘like a girl’, to ‘man up’ or to be strong. That is a symptom of patriarchy too, an archaic set of rigid gender roles that fail to map on to the modern world.
 
In the physical theatre workout of 5 Out of 10 Men, these arguments are rehearsed through the story of a young man’s suicide. Its issues are raised simply and without special nuance, its central character a broad cypher for societal concern. It sits within a move towards cultural interrogations of maleness alongside gender in general, whether Grayson Perry’s All Man series for Channel 4 or the Southbank Centre’s BEING A MAN festival. 5 Out of 10 Men’s dancers take on the physicality of the ideal, the swagger of the masculine as well as the exhaustion of pressure. Like its character, it flags as it goes on, tiredness and sweat streaking the performers and wracking their bodies. At its end, the narrative has led only to the death of the young man, his fate set by the pressures placed upon him.

- Lewis Church

5 Out of 10 Men ran at theSpace on Niddry Street until August 27th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/5-out-of-10-men

Deep Diving Ensemble: http://www.deepdivingmen.com
 
Samaritans Sucide Statistics Report 2016: http://www.samaritans.org/about-us/our-research/facts-and-figures-about-suicide/suicide-statistics-report-2016
 
Tony Porter: A Call to Men (TED):  http://www.ted.com/talks/tony_porter_a_call_to_men?language=en
 
Grayson Perry – Whither Big Balls?: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/tv-radio/2016/05/whither-big-balls-grayson-perry-investigates-masculinity-better-anyone-else
 
Southbank Centre BAM Festival: http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/festivals-series/being-a-man
 
Get Help with Suicide (CALM): https://www.thecalmzone.net/help/get-help/suicide/

MONOLOGUES OF A TIRED NURSE // Theatre for Thought

Stress-related mental health problems affect one in five primary care workers. Four in five have trouble sleeping. These are the realities of working in today’s NHS, according to mental health research by Mind, and they form the backdrop to Monologues of a Tired Nurse.

Two nurses step onto the stage, one an optimistic new recruit, Emily, and the other a battle-hardened and exhausted nurse-in-charge called Sally. Among the paraphernalia and body fluids of a normal day, a harrowing story unfolds, the characters’ interconnecting soliloquies showing how the most compassionate individuals can become casualties of an undoable job.

Sally says she came into nursing with a Superman complex, but soon realised there was no time to care. She feels broken – that she isn’t good or worthy, and is angry with people who say nurses are saints.

Emily is hopeful, almost angelic, but struggles to gain professional confidence. Sally’s attempts to toughen her up only seems to make things worse. Emily blames herself for the mistakes she makes under pressure, and sees the coping mechanisms she develops as inevitable.

Monologues is written by Stephanie Silver, who worked for eight years as a paediatric nurse and plays the hardbitten Sally. Her insider’s perspective shows a health service in which shortages have a direct impact on both patients and carers, and where the scrutiny of box-ticking bosses takes priority over the humanity of staff.

It's the issue of putting a brave face on things, and continuing under grinding levels of stress, that this play really addresses. Emily, lost in issues of her past and present, eventually leaves a note for Sally and takes her own life.

Mind’s research shows that one in three healthcare workers would never talk about their stress for fear of being seen as less capable - less able to take the heat of an NHS essentially on fire. Monologues starkly shows us the future we are facing if we are not prepared to care for those who work on the frontline of caring for us.

- Rebecca Mileham

Monologues of a Tired Nurse ran at theSpace @ Surgeon's Hall until August 27th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/monologues-of-a-tired-nurse

Mind’s 2016 survey into mental health in caring professions: http://www.mind.org.uk/news-campaigns/news/mind-finds-worrying-levels-of-stress-among-primary-care-staff/#.V8b8vqI9p8o

NHS staff cuts and reduction in care quality ‘inevitable’, say King’s Fund: https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/health/kings-fund-nhs-staffing-cuts-care-quality/

Student bursary cut 'may worsen NHS staff shortages': http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-36336830

Nursing Times article on a nurse's suicide being linked to work pressures: https://www.nursingtimes.net/walsall-nurses-suicide-linked-to-work-pressures-rules-coroner/1/5076937.article?sm=5076937

DOLLY WANTS TO DIE // Lung

Playtime is over, and now that they’re on their own Dolly and Mister Bear can get back to their foul-mouthed ranting, drug-taking, suicide-attempting day. Dolly wants to die, and she is quite clear about that.

Over the 45 minutes of the piece, we look on as Dolly attempts on her own life in ways which range from immolation to asking an audience member to smash her china head with a gigantic (on the scale of a doll) dildo. Helen Monks’ (Dolly) performance of the character’s more or less surreal suicide attempts resonates with that of Maria de Meideros as Karenine Battavia in the 1996 film News From The Good Lord. 

Dolly Wants To Die doesn’t directly explore the contentious topic of assisted suicide - but rather the difficulties faced by Generation Y within a saturated job market, leading them to move back with family (and their childhood toys) as they are not able to find work at the end of their education. 

In both cases, that of the film and Dolly Wants to Die, the darkly comic repetition of the character’s failure to die points to questions of agency. While Dolly has been around for what she deems to be long enough, doesn’t have any internal organs and “no pension plan in sight”, she doesn’t find the help to die when and how she chooses.

Where medicalisation could be seen to promote longevity over quality of life, and in the austere contexts of cuts to disability allowances, our relationship to end-of-life choices is changing rapidly. Debates around assisted suicide ought to be nuanced, and opening up uncomfortable conversations around death and dying is a useful starting point to making considered decisions for ourselves and our loved ones.

- Leo Burtin

Dolly Wants To Die is on at 16.10 at Underbelly Cowgate until August 28th. Hearing Loop available - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/dolly-wants-to-die 

Internet Movie Database entry on News from the Good Lord: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116081/ 

Article on the medicalisation of dying: http://www.bmj.com/content/324/7342/905.1

Information about Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20696006-being-mortal 

Information on Liz Carr’s Assisted Suicide the Musical: http://notdeadyetuk.org/assisted-suicide-musical/ 

Guardian Article on cuts to disability benefits: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/29/employment-and-support-allowance-the-disability-benefit-cuts-you-have-not-heard-about

ZERO // Popcorn Productions

Zero by Popcorn Productions is about surviving trauma in the transitional period from teenage years to adulthood; it is also about consent and questions our ability to relate events in a linear, narrative form. 

The staging of the piece is minimal. One performer (Grace Vance as Beth), a stool, a cigarette and a lighter. Beth has stepped out of her own 21st birthday party to talk to us. 

It takes her a while to find her feet, to get comfortable with us listening to her story, to what she has to say. As she begins, she could be seen to be no different to any other twenty-something, confident woman. She’s embarrassed by her dad’s dancing and keeps an eye on her best friend as she makes out with he DJ. 

It soon becomes apparent that Beth has a lot more to tell us, and that perhaps she is finding the words as she goes. At its core, Zero is a disruption of familiar narratives of trauma - where a singular episode triggers a chain of events leading to a culminating point; in Beth’s case, an attempted suicide. This is not how it happened for Beth, and this is not how she tells the story.

Rachel Ruth Kelly’s script reveals relatively early on that Beth has experienced “severe suicidal ideation”. This is the first diagnosis Zero offers us, and as it unfolds we find out more about Beth, her survival of bulimia nervosa, her own and her family’s relationship to depression.

As the piece develops, we begin to piece together Beth’s allusions to past events and episodic storytelling in an attempt to bring clarity to her experience.

As well as the character’s complex relationship to her health, Zero explores Beth’s romantic relationship with a man, experiencing abuse, and illustrates the complexity of the ill-understood idea of “traumatic bonding”, which can lead abuse survivors to maintain or develop feelings for their abusers.

(LB)

ZERO is on at 13.00 at Underbelly Cowgate until August 28th. Hearing Loop available - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/zero 

An animated video on consent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbei5JGiT8

Research on traumatic bonding: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/springer/vav/1993/00000008/00000002/art00002

DOUBTING THOMAS // Grassmarket Projects

Doubting Thomas is ostensibly about Glasgow's criminal underworld, but it's also about the consequences of childhood trauma and neglect, and it's about rehabilitation. Written and performed by Thomas McCrudden with support from the cast, it is the true story of his violent past, detailing his time both in and out of prison.

As well as reenacting scenes from his life, McCrudden explores the roots of his offending, investigating how and why someone might become criminally dispossessed. He says: 'When I was growing up I wasn’t shown love, and that created not just a man without a conscience or empathy. It created a monster.' He also talks about how he was always wearing a mask, and it was only when he found the courage to remove it that he was able to change.

McCrudden's stories of life in prison include descriptions of desperate young men unable to read or write, and several bloody suicide attempts. In Doubting Thomas, prison is not a place where people are empowered to turn their lives around; it is a place of violence and fear, full of young men let down by mainstream education who have found the only way they can prove themselves is through crime.

Research by the University of Strathclyde's Interventions for Vulnerable Youth service has explored the links between childhood trauma and offending. Consultant Clinical and Forensic Psychologist Dr Lorraine Johnston says: 'We see some children dismissed as attention seeking or manipulative. But 75-85 per cent of them have significant histories of trauma. Understanding their behaviour as a response to that can be the key.'

The Grassmarket Project was founded in 1990 by Artistic Director Jeremy Weller, who focuses on putting real life stories on stage. There is often only one professional actor in the cast, with the rest of the parts played by the people who actually experienced them. The act of creating and performing the play is a kind of catharsis, a way to confront one's demons and potentially move on. Doubting Thomas is performance as rehab. (HB)

Doubting Thomas is on at Summerhall (venue 26) at 19:20 until 28 August: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/doubting-thomas

'Mental Health and Prisons': http://www.who.int/mental_health/policy/mh_in_prison.pdf

'Prison is not working – it’s time for a rehabilitation revolution': http://www.halsburyslawexchange.co.uk/prison-is-not-working-its-time-for-a-rehabilitation-revolution/

'Domestic violence a trigger for three quarters of violent young offenders': http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/14329830.Domestic_violence_a_trigger_for_three_quarters_of_violent_young_offenders/

'Understanding the Cycle, Childhood Maltreatment and Future Crime': https://www.princeton.edu/~jcurrie/publications/Understanding%20the%20CycleChildhood.pdf

Positive Prison, Positive Futures: http://www.positiveprison.org

Prison Reform Trust: http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk

The Howard League for Penal Reform: http://howardleague.org

ZERO DOWN // Angel On The Corner TC

Among the 17 women interviewed or writing first-person about their experience of political activism in Helena Earnshaw and Angharad Penrhyn Jones' invigorating book Here We Stand is Eileen Chubb, founder of the charity and campaign Compassion in Care. She became, much to her own surprise, an activist after working for years in care homes run by Bupa, and discovering widespread abuse of the elderly inhabitants. At the bottom of the homepage of the CiC website is a melancholy dedication to Pat Gifford that reads: “After witnessing the abuse of a loved one in a care home, Pat Gifford was so affected by this experience that she became increasingly afraid of growing older and needing care herself that she took her own life.”

Zero Down is set in a small-town care home in which abuse of the elderly patients is carried out on a daily basis: not by staff but by management, who allow the store cupboard to run out of wet wipes and humans to sit in their own faeces for hours before bothering to send a nurse to them. These are all typical of the routine cost-cutting carried out by an organisation run in the service of profitability and not in accord with basic humanity. Working on zero-hour contracts, the nurses are expected to pass their shift not at bedsides but in a staff room, waiting to be summoned by electronic buzzer to a specific patient, clocking in only as and when they are called. Unsurprisingly, this raises the women's own stress levels and sets them at odds with each other.

Writer Sarah Hehir tells two stories here: the visible one of the working women on stage, and the invisible one of the disintegrating humans trapped in their beds. One of the nurses, Benni, is a single mother of three at the mercy of a neoliberal economy, failing to keep her head above water because the system is constructed for her to drown: sympathy for her contracts each time she spews a racist slur, then expands as she reveals her detailed knowledge of individual patients' tastes, habits and frailties. That kindness is contrasted with the exploitative purpose of Erin, an aspiring journalist reading up on female war reporters as she attempts to make her mark by following the example of Eileen Chubb. The distance between conniving Erin and compassionate Eileen becomes clear, however, when the young woman confesses that changing the soiled nappy of a patient makes her think that euthanasia is a good idea. Her tone creates an ambiguity as to whether she means self-elective.

The picture of decrepitude that Hehir presents has almost nothing appealing about it. It's not just a dramatic construct that Benni is the mother of small children: whether at home or at work, her life is one of changing nappies. But she also describes carrying a male patient to the toilet to spare his feelings of mortification at being so infantilised: an act of generosity that helps him continue to value his life. But that generosity also requires the energy of the young: in Michael Haneke's acutely observed film Amour, an elderly man grows unable to care for his declining wife, and when money can no longer buy what she needs, he, like Erin, begins to see euthanasia as their only option. The question woven through both strands of Zero Down is one of value: how shall we value human existence, and what happens when power and profit are the margins or expression of that value?

- MC

Zero Down is on at 13.00 at Pleasance Courtyard until August 29th (not 18th). Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Hearing Loop - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/zero-down

Publisher page for Here We Stand: http://www.honno.co.uk/dangos.php?ISBN=9781909983021

Compassion in Care: http://www.compassionincare.com/

What exactly is neoliberalism?: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/booked-3-what-exactly-is-neoliberalism-wendy-brown-undoing-the-demos

Alexander Zeldin discussing Beyond Caring, his play about workers on zero-hours contracts: http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/the-director-as-god-is-bullshit/

Diary of a woman who chose euthanasia: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/23/euthanasia.cancer

Two views on Haneke's Amour: https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/feb/28/amour-advert-for-euthanasia and http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/surviving-amour

DECISION TIME // Juliette Burton

Juliette has a big decision to make. Should she marry the love of her life? But it’s not that simple.   Not only is he the love of her life, he is the reason she is still alive.

We are taken on a decision lead tour of Juliettes’ life which builds to the point where she is now. From her first experiences of otherness to the first point of her taking control in her life and her eating disorders, her dalliances with self harm to the critical moment where she has written the note, she has the knives and she’s ready for the final act.

This show is not about the philosophy of free will, causality or determinism. Kant and Spinoza don’t even enter the room. From the outset we explore the pathology of cognitive distortion. If we decide one way we may hurt, upset or knowingly please, we may experience guilt or pleasure, we may be loved more or rejected. Decision making can be fraught.

We are slowly exposed to some of Burtons’ psychiatric history, her diagnoses and symptoms. Her previous decisions and impulses take on a new gravitas. For most people certain decisions or actions are easy, for example getting out of bed is just something we do, an almost automatic process.

What if you are so depressed you are unable to get out of bed, clothe or feed yourself?  What if you are so gripped by anxiety, decision making becomes impossible? What if the only viable option feels like suicide? For some, there is no alternative, for some though at the crucial moment, almost in that final act they find a reason to survive, to sustain, to want to realise the potential of the most meaningful version of their life.

The ultimate choice we make maybe whether to live or die, to kill ourselves or not. Suicide generally isn’t a laughing matter but Burton found her reason to live and the strength to share it. We are taken to the point under her bed where, with knife cutting flesh the phone rings, missed messages from her lover and the sound of the key in the door.

The awkward discomfort in the room is palpable, but it is a subject which needs discussing. In 2014 one person took their own life every 40 seconds. One in four will be affected by serious mental health issues in the coming year. The statistics are staggering yet we are still not addressing the issues. There is still a disparity between the funding and waiting lists of physical health and mental health services. The stigma of discussing mental health only compounds the impact on our wellbeing. It is definitely time to make a decision, as the mental health foundation say it’s ‘Time to Change’. (AM)

Juliette Burton: Decision Time is on at 16.30 at Gilded Balloon Teviot until 28th August (not 15th). Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/juliette-burton-decision-time

Assisted Suicide: The Musical by Liz Carr premieres at Unlimited Festival at the Royal Festival Hall on September 10th and 11th: http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/assisted-suicide-the-musical-97416

The Suicide by Suhayla El-Bushra, after Nikolai Erdman (1928), recently at the National Theatre: https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/the-suicide

Prevention of young suicide: https://www.papyrus-uk.org/