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/