Brace Brace review – High-stakes plane hijacking drama goes bumpy | theater

IIts structure is a suspenseful, high-stakes drama that is frighteningly compelling: a honeymoon couple boards a hijacked flight. We watch her plane land in what she believes are her final moments. The horror of the crashing plane in Oli Forsyth’s play is portrayed in a thrilling manner. A passenger boarding bridge-shaped cross stage is raised at one end and leads down to a gaping underground hole reminiscent of the vast sky outside. To slide down the bridge, one must be in free fall from 40,000 feet above the ground.

Ray (Phil Dunster) and Sylvia (Anjana Vasan) take turns speaking to each other and directly to the audience, taking us from meet-cute to marriage, the plane crash and its emotional consequences.

Anna Reid’s set design is inspired, as is Paul Arditti’s hair-raising sound design, complete with the eerie silence of the engines shutting down as the hijacker (Craige Els) storms the cockpit and attempts to strangle the captain. Then there’s the bold dive, along with Simeon Miller’s glowing gangway lighting. This all feels incredibly real and dangerous. Daniel Raggett’s direction is also snappy, bringing both playfulness and menace as the drama progresses.

But the pair are unconvincing, as are the forced moral dilemmas in Forsyth’s script, although the performances are compelling, particularly Vasan’s. At first it seems as if the events on the plane will cause distrust of their marriage on terra firma, like after the avalanche in Force Majeure.

In flashbacks we learn how Sylvia stopped the kidnapper and became a hero in the media, leaving Ray sad and full of self-pity. She is then overcome with fear and anger when she learns that the kidnapper escaped without jail time because he claims to have been struck by paranoia and forgotten his murderous episode.

That feels incredible, but so much about the pair is particularly nuanced, from Ray’s irritability to Sylvia’s apparent post-traumatic stress disorder to the binary moral arguments about whether the hijacker is good or bad, whether to blame the airline or the hijacker is. and whether the marriage can last for Ray when Sylvia is so changed now. Their respective reactions also seem binary: Ray buries the trauma and Sylvia becomes compulsive.

It’s a shame it doesn’t succeed, because Forsyth’s central preoccupation with what happens to people who escape death in these dramatic ways is so compelling. It’s a bumpy ride at the moment.