Review: GROUNDED, Gate Theatre

Previously performed at the Gate in 2013 after a successful run at the Edinburgh Festival, Grounded returns to Notting Hill by popular demand. It is immediately apparent why.

Not only does this monologue enjoy the exciting voice of playwright George Brant, it also offers a spectacular solo performance from original performer Lucy Ellinson. The one-act piece, lasting only an hour, is the breakneck account of a pilot who crashes down to earth when she unexpectedly falls pregnant, and winds up remotely operating drones at a Nevada airforce base.

At no point does this feel like a play about feminism or patriarchy - in fact the possibility of this is dangled and then laughingly and directly removed. Rather, it's a play about individual needs and dreams and how life can deconstruct them until one day we find ourselves in a box we never imagined being trapped in. Brant also scrutinises the very current notion of constant surveillance, which is cleverly compounded by Oliver Townsend's design.

Some political overtures are present in Brant's examination of the devastation of war and the dangers of addiction to combat, however these are very firmly explored through a human lens and at no point does the production become sermonising. Always, it is infused with the direct emotional currency of human experience. While the pilot is in many ways typically tomboyish and brash, we do see flickers of tenderness and boatloads of her eventual vulnerability, which saves the character from two-dimensionality.

Ellinson's pilot is brash and uncompromising, but also irrevocably human. Her performance is measured and carefully weighed. Not once does it feel as though an emotional toe is out of line. She's electric as she leads us through the soaring heights of flying an F16 fighter jet in the Iraq War to the crushing lows of being forced to fly drones from the ground after her maternity leave.

The dialogue is punchy and efficient, but always entrancing. Ellinson leaps and flicks us through the staccato story with no hint of struggle or stumble, hitting every moment and moving between often poetic descriptions of flight to chopping, snapping narrative that carries us ceaselessly along. Her gaze is corrosive. She stares us down with a proud grin from the stage from the moment the house opens.

Director Christopher Haydon boldly encases her in a gauze cube. The floor is a light show changing between an AC/DC rock disco and the subtle, bleeping field of grey mapping, filled with targets and ominous possibility in Benjamin Walden's video design. Mark Howland's lighting changes the cube from translucent to opaque in less than "one point two seconds". One moment the pilot is flying, the next she is grounded - but she is always trapped, always observed.

Tom Gibbons's sound is eclectic and visceral, however on occasion the musical interludes seems somewhat misplaced and purposeless. The apparent simplicity of the production is misleading - upon reflection, Townsend's design feels closely considered and complete.

Grounded is finished all too quickly as we tumble to the ground with the once lofty and always defiant pilot as she struggles to come to terms with her new familial reality. Brant's highly engaging narrative is masterfully performed by Lucy Ellinson and Haydon's direction brings everything together in a crashing crescendo to create an endlessly exciting production.

Grounded at Gate Theatre until 18 March

Photo credit: Iona Firouzabadi

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