In its setup, this is an edge-of-the-seat, high-stakes drama that feels horrifyingly immersive: a honeymooning couple get on a hijacked flight. We watch their plane career to the ground during what they think are their last moments. The terror of the dropping aircraft in Oli Forsyth’s play is thrillingly rendered. A traverse stage in the shape of a boarding bridge is elevated at one end and leads down to a gaping underground hole, which suggests the wide-open sky outside. To slide down the bridge is to be in freefall from 40,000 feet above ground.
Ray (Phil Dunster) and Sylvia (Anjana Vasan) alternately talk to each other and directly to the audience, taking us from meet-cute to marriage, the aeroplane disaster and its emotional aftermath.
Anna Reid’s set is inspired, as is the hair-raising sound design by Paul Arditti, complete with the eerie silence of engines switching off as the hijacker (Craige Els) storms the cockpit and attempts to throttle the captain. Then there is the keening of the nosedive, together with Simeon Miller’s luminous gangway lighting. All of it feels incredibly real and dangerous. Daniel Raggett’s direction is snappy too, carrying both playfulness and threat over the course of the drama.
But the couple are unconvincing, and so are the forced moral dilemmas in Forsyth’s script, although the performances are compelling, particularly Vasan’s. Initially it seems like the events on the plane trigger distrust in their marriage back on terra firma, as in the aftermath of the avalanche in Force Majeure.
We learn, in flashbacks, how Sylvia stopped the hijacker, becoming a have-a-go-hero in the media, which leaves Ray smarting and full of self-pity. She then becomes consumed by fear and anger on learning that the hijacker has got away without a prison sentence because he claims to have been gripped by paranoia, and has forgotten his murderous episode.
This feels unbelievable, but so much about the couple is peculiarly lacking in nuance, from Ray’s petulance about what seems to be Sylvia’s PTSD to the binary moral arguments over whether the hijacker is good or bad, whether the airline should be blamed or the hijacker, and whether the marriage can last for Ray if Sylvia is now so changed. Their respective reactions seem too binary as well: Ray buries the trauma and Sylvia becomes obsessive.
It is a shame it does not fly because Forsyth’s central preoccupation with what happens to people who evade death in this dramatic way is so alluring. For now, it is a bumpy ride.
At the Royal Court, London, until 9 November
