A Theatrical Cryography - is this wise theatre-making?

You may have heard of the apt term 'cryography', coined to describe books which detail the realities of child abuse and addiction, of dark times of the soul, usually written by the person affected or a ghost writer. These cryographies usually spare no grisly detail and, in my opinion, offer quite a voyeuristic experience to a reader. They allow you to peer into someone's darkest times, to cry and grimace and feel disgusted, and then to close the book and forget about it. They seem to offer more a satisfaction for morbid fascination or a feel-good lift about someone's heroic climb back to some semblance of normality, rather than making any particular comment or moving away from a basic recounting of events.

Yesterday, I saw a piece of theatre which I would consider to fall into this 'cryography' category. It was about a man's experience of accompanying his ex-wife to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to end her life. I was asked to support someone to attend the performance, so this is not a piece that I had actually chosen to watch, but I found myself at the performance, and watch it I had to. The piece was performed by one man, an actor (an actor before his decision to dramatise this experience), who plays the part of himself, as well as the part of his dead ex-wife in her final weeks and then days of life.

For me, this was not a good experience. I did not expect it to be pleasant, but I was disturbed by its tastelessness, and its lack of enquiry about the business of assisted suicide. If anyone associated to the performance were to read this, they may think me callous and cruel; how can you criticise someone's real life experience? Well, the reality is, if you choose to present an aspect of your life on a stage and invite an audience, to call it a piece of theatre and take it on tour, you invite criticism. And, so unsettling was the content, I feel the need to confront what was represented on stage.

As mentioned, no gory details were spared, and to be honest, I wanted them to be spared. I did not appeciate seeing the actor on stage grimacing and re-enacting his dead ex-wife's experience of her final enema being administered in the hotel room on the morning of her death. I am not prudish. But I felt it to be unnecessarily voyeuristic, just like much of the performance piece. I also had an uncomfortable sense of the dead woman's total inability to consent to the performance taking place. She had been suffering to the extent where she felt it necessary to go through the stress and rigmarole of travelling to Dignitas - would she really have wanted all of that represented onstage and performed to the general public?

For me, as a piece of theatre, this lacked any sense of enquiry, any desire to explore the issues being represented on stage. The actor presented the woman as wanting to die and that was her right and it was right to assist her to do so. The business of assisted suicide (and it does cost rather a lot) was not interrogated. Why is that people find that their ability to cope declines to the point they no longer want to live? Are we, as a society, implicated in these feelings? What happens to the family member who desperately objects and cannot reconcile their feelings to the suicidal person's wishes? This was another aspect sidelined in the performance - the dead women's son is portrayed as calling her over and over again begging her not to do it, but that is all we hear of this situation, the son's story is not resolved which is dramatically unsatisfying and misses an important and potent line of enquiry.

I also found the piece frightening - it felt like a complete advocation of the 'kindness' required to support someone to die. Whilst I do not believe that people should be left to suffer great pain unduly, the debate is far more complex than this. What happens when boundaries begin to blur between being gravely unwell and being disabled? Is there more that we could do to support terminally ill people and provide more appropriate and helpful palliative care so that people can live out their life in their home country, with family around them?

I don't pretend to know the answers to these questions and I don't pretend to have an in-depth knowledge of the subject. But I do know that I think that theatre can be powerful, and at times dangerous and offensive. At one point, the actor describes seeing the 'charnel house' where zimmerframes and wheelchairs of the people who have chosen to die are stored at the Swiss clinic. He then makes a comparison to Auschwitz. This, to me, is woefully inappropriate and ill-thought out - the entire concept of Dignitas is based on a choice, a decision to die. Those exterminated at concentration camps did not have such a choice. To evoke emotive imagery and manipulate the audience is all that this piece did throughout - the sense of investigation and thought-provocation that theatre should always strive for was lost. If I am not allowed to say that this was a bad piece of theatre, I will say that I do not think this was a wise piece of theatre making.