how-to-disappear-completely_2014HOWTODK_UDWho would choose to relive their mother’s death every night on stage? Not just talk about it, but fully confront it, watch video footage of her in the late stages of cancer, re-examine over and over the decision to assist her suicide? Lighting designer Itai Erdal has made that choice.

Erdal started recording his mother when he found out that she only had nine months left to live. His aim was to turn the footage into a documentary film. Life nudged him in a different direction and, interspersed with some of the footage, he describes different lights and their effects – the way they can frame different people of different shapes, how they can create warmth, coldness. How effective darkness can be. Every time the lights black out the darkness is complete, thick, heavy.

As a performer Erdal is disarmingly arrogant, or maybe frank is a fairer word. He has no problem telling us how good he is at telling stories, though of course that is for the audience to decide. But he is also honest, revealing how much it troubles him that he goes home alone each night. He tells us about his sister and his stepfather, but it is his mother whom we get to know the most.

There is no synthesis between the two foci of the show – lighting, and his mother’s illness. And, since his skill lies more in his knowledge of lights rather than in his raconteurial ability, there is something cold and matter-of-fact in the way that he explains his mother’s death. It feels cold to even say that; it’s not meant to cheapen his experience. But the show comes across as if he is cheapening his experience, telling it again and again every night.

His sister is sceptical about the video project and the probing questions he asks his mother: ‘The things she wants to tell me, I want to know. The things she doesn’t want to tell me, I don’t want to know.”

Each scene, as the narrative builds closer to the inevitable, is more desperately sad than the previous. His mother’s descriptions of what cancer feels like are grimly engrossing. Theatre is so often about a personal reaction and, while others might be moved to tears, I just feel uncomfortable that this performance seems more about him, a vanity project for his sake and that he is taking advantage. Maybe he is. He is careful to explain that lighting can control our emotions, and maybe that is what he is trying to do: to manipulate. His detachment from his own emotions, his concern with turning it into a story, is discomfiting.

Erdal certainly raises some thorny and relevant issues: assisted dying, dignity, a performer’s responsibility. Some performers can invite an audience into their personal life and make them feel part of it. It feels like Erdal is doing the opposite – forcing his private life out into a public arena. Why? Just to tear jerk? For the sake of a show? If so, that’s not good enough.

How To Disappear Completely is at Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61) until 24 August (no performance 13 August). For more information and tickets see the Edinburgh Fringe website.