The little events of our lives and what they become when they’ve passed, the technical process of film development, the sensation of jumping and landing, digital culture and its supplanting of the analogue.
Jumping And Other Thoughts seeks parallels and overlaps in a manner that rests somewhere between theatre and poetry. In fact analogue is precisely the word: Annie loves nothing so much as cameras that go click rather than beep, Summer, a synaesthesiac engrossed literally in the subtle flavor of perception, seeking solidarity in a dead homeless man’s graffiti, and a darkroom technician drawing analogies through it all to the dying art of the photographic process and the development of memory. Everything here means something else, the script skillfully finds the similarities of form within the varying substances of mundane life.
But ultimately, and unfortunately, it’s the mundane which spoils the effect. For all this the actual events of the play seem to have been specifically chosen for their meaninglessness. The homeless guy’s cryptic scrawling are not code or syndrome, but essentially nothing at all, and so the characters’ almost desperate attempts to find something within them come away as pointless. And for all its poetry and cohesion, nothing here really leads to anything. And perhaps that’s the entire point; that life as a series of moments receding into an unreachable past have only the meaning derived from an arbitrary point of view, but it still leaves one thinking, well, so what then?
3/5 
Daniel Connell
