Social Suicide

Celebrated playwright Al Smith speaks to Junta Sekimori about societal breakdown and the inspiration behind his new production

feature (edinburgh) | Read in About 4 minutes
Published 28 Jul 2008

When bees began disappearing en masse from North America and Europe in 2006, an ominous Einstein quote pervaded the press claiming the extinction of bees would be closely followed by that of mankind. It was an alarming prediction which, in context, was positively sinister. Certain apiaries were reporting losses of up to 70% of their honey bee population and nobody could meaningfully explain what was causing it. It was a phenomenon steeped in mystery and straight from the netherworld of science fiction.

Thankfully though, nobody has been able to back the Einstein theory, nor prove that Einstein actually said it at all, and it seems that our species will continue for a while yet, albeit in the throes of a deadly honey craving. But Fringe maverick Al Smith has another, not entirely unrelated idea connecting bees with humans, which he brings to Edinburgh this summer in all its prickly pertinence.

The Bird and the Bee represents Smith’s third outing at the Fringe. His 2005 debut Enola, a darkly impactful play about the distant repercussions of Hiroshima’s nuclear annihilation, and his magnetic 2006 monologue Radio scooped him the Sunday Times Playwriting Award two years running. He currently earns his bread at the BBC, scripting episodes for Casualty, Eastenders and Holby City.

The Bird and the Bee is in fact a collaborative project with London-based playwright Matt Hartley and is split into two parts. Or rather, it’s a double play. Smith’s The Bird and Hartley’s The Bee share one basic agenda and share the same cast, but are two discrete creations that don’t have to be seen together to make sense. “They do tie in together but they’re two very different glimpses into the same world,” insists Smith. “Both are autonomous pieces of work in their own right.”

The blurb they’ve provided in the Fringe programme paints an enigmatic picture: “Chloe and Jacob are beautifully in love. The first time they meet, they end their lives.” It’s a romance as curious as the incredible disappearing act of the bees, and a story which Smith enthusiastically describes as a collision of two chaotic journeys.

The original inspiration was the notorious Bridgend suicides. Natasha Randall’s death in January marked the seventh link in a chain of young people who have taken their own lives over the last year. They all knew each other, and in their passing left behind only the grim whispers of a dismal conspiracy. The myth of internet suicide pacts came to haunt the national rumour mill: were they choosing to die together?

Chloe and Jacob’s story in The Bird and the Bee is, while not an explicit reference to Bridgend, a look into the psychology of social suicide. But though an existential crisis or an esoteric ritual might have aptly pictured it for some, Smith sees scientific inevitability.

“I always try to find scientific theories that underpin all the things I tell in my plays,” says Smith, who linked guilt with geometry in Enola and the cosmos with clinical psychology in Radio. This is a play that doesn’t merely bring in animal comparisons for eloquence, but leans on zoology for leverage.

“I was reading an article on Bridgend in the newspaper and on the other side of the page was this item about Colony Collapse Disorder in Western honey bees. They were flying out of their nests and dying for no apparent reason. I immediately said to myself: here, on the two sides of this page, is an interesting play about social collapse.”

“There’s this sense of a clinically observable rot in Britain today, a result of a culture having massively overextended itself. We’ve gone too far and we’ve spent too much.” We can think of it in terms of Hooke’s law of elasticity, apparently, which Smith explains is the science of springs. A spring normally returns to its original shape when it’s pulled, but strain it beyond a certain point and it becomes deformed forever. “We’ve reached yield point, and flaws are starting to appear everywhere,” he says, “and my play is about just that: colony collapse and overstretched youths.”