With the terrible exception of 9/11, increased security and passenger checks have seen the number of plane hijackings per year diminish to virtually none. The intriguing premise of Oli Forsyth’s Brace Brace is how you would move forward with your life if you did experience – and survive – such an exceptional and harrowing experience.
Honeymooners Ray and Sylvia find themselves in such a nightmare when their plane is hijacked by a passenger who overpowers the pilot. A struggle ensues and Ray is incapacitated, but Sylvia stops the hijacker and the plane is saved. She becomes a media hero, to the cost of Ray’s bruised ego. But things fall apart when she learns that their attacker has been released on psychological grounds.
Ted Lasso’s Phil Dunster and Wicked Little Letters’ Anjana Vasan have charisma to burn as Ray and Sylvia, quickly conjuring their relationship in the affectionate banter of the play’s lighter early scenes, as they introduce themselves to us. They make the most of their characters' increasing schism as the play moves rapidly through the dramatically fertile territory of PTSD and Sylvia’s desperate need to find somewhere to put her anger and trauma.
But the self-consciousness of Forsyth’s writing is a struggle. Perhaps due to the lean 70-minute run-time, the easy-flowing dialogue at the start – before Ray and Sylvia describe the hijacking and its aftermath to us – gives way to emotional developments that feel hasty and truncated, as if steps are missing. Conversations sound more like philosophical debates than a hurting couple grappling with the impossible. Vasan has to navigate Sylvia’s psychological shift from zen to self-destructively obsessive as sympathetically as possible in just a few minutes.
Where Daniel Raggett’s production scores points is its staging. Anna Reid’s starkly abstract and effective set sees us sat on either side of a plane aisle-like slope that bisects the narrow strip of stage at a slant. Dunster, Vasan and Craig Els (playing multiple roles) jump over or cling desperately to this as the play flashes back to the hijacking. Together with Simeon Miller’s high-impact lighting and the roar of Paul Arditti’s nerve-jangling sound design, it’s a powerfully visceral experience in no need of words.