Edinburgh Theatre
Beachy Head
Pleasance Dome
***

The State We’re In
Assembly Rooms
***

One death in every 9,000 in this country is a suicide: this is the bleak statistic with which the Analogue company furnishes us at the beginning of the dreamy, ethereal Beachy Head. In the subsequent 90 minutes of accomplished, occasionally wafty, devised theatre, the company explores the ripple effects when one man takes his life at the titular spot.

The piece works best when layers of time and memory are superimposed, as we move backwards and forwards from the death of 20-something Stephen Mitchell (Sam Taylor). In a series of short, sometimes undernourished, multimedia scenes, his widow (Emma Jowett, perfectly capturing the brittleness of grief), a pathologist and a pair of filmmakers who happen to have caught Stephen’s last minutes on camera circle each other tentatively. Issues of expiation and exploitation are explored but what finally persuaded Stephen to take that fatal plunge remains, as it must, frustratingly unknowable.

The State We’re In certainly isn’t the most subtle writing that Edinburgh has seen all Festival but this debut piece by Zia Trench brims with a righteous anger we can’t help but admire.

Its subject is Brian Haw, who has camped in anti-war protest in Parliament Square for the past eight years, lightly fictionalised as Tommy Price.

Trench and director Justin Butcher flag up and then flag up again, just in case, the age-old conundrum that a man intent on saving the world — and our centuries-old right to peaceful protest — doesn’t have time to save his family, who are disintegrating without him. Michael Byrne, marvellously weather-beaten of face, makes Tommy just the right combination of heroic and infuriating, and Diana Walker skilfully suggests a decent person struggling to escape the mesh of government ministerial spin.

Beachy Head until 30 August (0131 556 6550, www.pleasance.co.uk). State until 31 August (0131 623 3030. www.assemblyfestival.com).