In Oli Forsyth’s new play, Ray (Phil Dunster) and Sylvia (Anjana Vasan) are describing how they first met at a party, how they fell in love, how they got married – a perfect wedding with a free bar and good tunes – and how they set off for their honeymoon. They are telling us this after the fact, and after the plane taking them to paradise briefly fell out of the sky.
For Ray and Sylvia, though, a would-be hijacker (an impressive multi-roling Craige Els) was not the worst thing that happened: that ensued after the fact as the two took different approaches to managing the impact the event had on them – as individuals and as a couple.
With the two entrenched in their separate views of how to process events, we see their bickering grow as we flash back to key moments. Sylvia becomes the more unreasonable of the pair. While Ray wants to move on with his life, she cannot let go of what she believes is an injustice. Frustratingly, she arrives at that place quite quickly and remains there so that we see the same arguments repeating. Though the intention may be to show her state of mind, the cycle begins to wear on us as much as it does on Ray.
With just two rows of audience members on either side of Anna Reid’s runway-like set in the Royal Court’s upstairs space – as tight as a plane cabin – director Daniel Raggett manages to create a hijacking worthy of the latest Hollywood blockbuster with an intense, heart-racing fight for survival in the sky as Paul Arditti’s sound and Simeon Miller’s lighting combine with Alex Payne’s fight direction and George Mann’s movement direction to incredible effect. It’s worth seeing for the edge-of-your-seat action scenes alone.
It’s easy to get onside with Dunster’s affable Ray, his genial disposition making his later struggles all the more heart-wrenching. Vasan brings a fierceness to Sylvia even if she is constrained by the early ramping up of her character’s paranoia as Forsyth attempts to demonstrate the contrasting ways in which two people deal with trauma and grief in entirely different ways.
At just 70 minutes, there may have been room for greater exploration of the impact of their relationship beyond the two-sided face-off. Much feels half-explained as we race through the character’s development. How did Ray process his classroom breakdown? How did Sylvia react when Phil returned from Athens? What was Phil’s reaction on returning? We end up with too incomplete a picture of a couple whose early mid-air fight for survival gave much more promise.
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (Good)
BRACE BRACE is at the Royal Court Theatre, London, until 8 November
