Theatre / arnolfini
Review: Grounded, Arnolfini
You know it’s going to be a strange day when you’re too pregnant to fit into your fighter pilot suit.
This Gate Theatre production brings George Brant’s award-winning solo play to the Arnolfini in association with Bristol Old Vic. The Pilot starts by surveilling us, static in a cube of phosphorescent gloom. Soon enough she’s strutting around her small space with more machismo than her male colleagues, proudly declaring “I take the guy spot”.
After an unplanned pregnancy, marriage and maternity leave, she returns to work but, much to her disgust, is reassigned to the ‘Chair Force’, operating unmanned aerial vehicles – drones – and the scene is set for homing in a “bird without eyes” from the safety of a Las Vegas trailer towards another desert twelve hours away.
Between repetitive, enervating surveillance shifts and mommy duties, it’s only a matter of time before the first kill and the insidious effects of being a machine-age assassin of some other human begin to take their toll.
This is both a soldier’s journey and a mother’s journey. Here, the drama’s linear structure helps us to stay with this incredibly wordy play. Director Christopher Haydon simply allows the brittle, skittering language the space that a monologue needs to keep the audience locked in the world of the piece. Subtle design by Oliver Townsend works with Mark Howland’s interrogative lighting to underscore the shifts in tone that keep the story rattling along.
As The Pilot, Lucy Ellinson gives a scorching performance, moving from the flier in complete control, an airborne god of all she surveys beyond her cockpit – “ I have the blue” – to a woman struggling to maintain a survivable moral position, becoming a speaker of machine-gun dialogue as she unravels in front of a grey screen.
Brant’s coherent writing shows the wider emotional blast radius caused by these remote drone killers. It’s a fine example of the political drawn down to the intensely personal, while still avoiding didacticism. Ultimately we are presented with a scenario that takes us beyond the end of the narrative: The Pilot is still trapped in the cube. We are the surveillers. We’re not “military-age males”, so we’re not “the guilty”, right?
Or are we the ones inactive but weaponized by lack of facts about US and UK drones? It’s a question this intelligent, theatrical play wants us to explore – and with its forthcoming New York, Anne Hathaway-led incarnation, these themes will attract more attention. But you won’t see better than this compact production – because Lucy Ellinson is the pilot. She has the blue.
Grounded continues at Arnolfini until Saturday. January 31. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.bristololdvic.org.uk/grounded.html
Pics: Iona Firouzabadi / Igor Dmitry
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