This well-meaning, entertaining yet superficial approach to suicide is aimed at younger audiences who are confronted, not with the loss of a friend due to online bullying, but with a story about someone’s depressed mother who decides to end it all. This distancing approach begins with the title of the production, Harakiri, suggesting something ritualistic even honourable. As a whole the piece sways to traditional view of death as ‘relief’ and even ‘relaxation’, as opposed to one that spotlights an act of extreme violence projected against oneself. 

Discussing suicide in a way that softens its blow, ruminating over its reasons: the inconsequentiality of rational and irrational decisions in today’s world, for example, when truth and fiction cross into each other with such ease, is ok – but not really enough. The focus is on the son and the point that he (and everyone else) be exonerated from the mother’s action. But this has the effect of isolating the woman further, she becomes someone to be pitied, but also patronised and implicitly ostracised. 

Given the prevalence of self-harming behaviour in one form or another among the vast majority of the population, and yet the apparent ease with which we treat each other in a way that knowingly diminishes, a more profound and empathetic examination of something that haunts us all as human beings would have been welcome.