BRACE BRACE - Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs

Lucky you! Glad to hear it's a good one. I have a matinee ticket coming up which I was wondering whether to keep but think I will now!

Some pretty bad reviews for this

I'm definitely in the 4 star camp.  

Brett Goldstein and Toheeb Jimoh in last night for Phil Dunster (big grins to and from him as he enters). Also Jason Isaccs but the night was oversold, he had to sit separately from his wife and then FoH even had to ask AD David Byrne to give up his seat as they needed one more!

Saw Brace Brace yesterday I agree really don't understand the bad reviews, I felt that the play was good on how people respond to trauma not all of the story line worked but well worth seeing, the ending shocked people!

More about how a traumatic event like that affects people. I was familiar with the story of the real flight that the playwright had been on so found it very interesting indeed, especially from the perspective of me also working as airline crew.

Thought Anjana and Phil were completely wonderful and had a great connection.

Saw this last night, and was dazzled by the the direction (the director, Daniel Raggett, who also brilliantly staged the hilarious recent "Accidental Death of an Anarchist" was sitting opposite me last night lol), the set and the acting, but the play itself, which is funny, fast and furious at the beginning loses credibility and focus as it progresses, despite or perhaps because it is based on a true story.

Some spoilers follow. . .

Daniel Raggett really makes you feel like you're inches from the interior of a plane hijack, with the canted slide of a stage, the tilting expansive light rig, the scary roaring plane sound effects and the screaming actors. I was breathless watching that sequence. The set was truly one of the most impressive sets I've ever seen in that space.

And I loved how Oli Forsyth had his characters breaking the fourth wall, bonding with us ("enjoy this bit because it won't be funny later" or some such line from Phil Dunster's character) before hell broke loose, making us feel part of that hell.

But Forsyth loses his audience by depriving them of rudders with which to understand the action.

As Dave B posted, we can see that the real mentally-ill hijacker was Kenyan, and it was the Kenyan legal/medical system that treated the hijacker far more gently than our own would have treated him. Here, he would have been prosecuted, and even if found not guilty by reason of insanity, our medics would not have hastily freed him, out of consideration for public safety. By removing this specific information from his storytelling, Forsyth makes it seem as if this is partially a critique of our laissez faire medical-legal establishment, when in reality, we are not laissez faire about this stuff at all. So he creates a cognitive disconnect in anyone who knows how Broadmoor/The Rampton/etc operate.

Later, when Anjana Vasan's character gets upset that the hijacker has been released, she is patronised and critiqued for not understanding that the man was mentally ill. But for a script that talks a LOT about how the mentally ill man deserves sensitivity (either to get us falsely angry about our system OR to get us unfairly biased against Vasan's character), where the hell is the sensitivity for Vasan's character who is herself obviously suffering from PTSD? Where Forsyth includes medical sensitivity about the hijacker, there is not one peep about medical sensitivity for Vasan's character, who is instead portrayed as either an unreasonably angry conspiracy theorist or as a feisty crusader uncovering a genuine conspiracy. The result is increasing cognitive disconnect in the audience, who have no idea who or what to care about.

The actual denouement, which builds on the idea that life is full of possibilities and probabilities ("buttered toast has a 63 percent chance of landing butter side down" we are told at the beginning) that we just have to live with, works really well. But along the way, Forsyth leaves us so rudderless who or what to care about that we start not caring.

Thankfully, I did care about whatever Anjana Vasan cared about because she is such a good actor, but for huge swaths of the story, I didn't know whether she was "Dirty Harry" gunning for the liberal establishment, or whether she was a woman with PTSD, that noone ever mentioned, while constantly rubbing the hijacker's mental issues in the poor woman's face.

For physical action and staging and chummy fourth wall breaking, Phil Dunster and Anjana Vasan and the Director really bring the goods, but for coherent storytelling, Forsyth needs to get more specific to get more universal. By cutting all threads that connect to the real world, we, like the characters, are left falling into oblivion for far too long.

3 stars from me.

Spoilers follow. . .

In the real event, the pilot poked his finger in the hijacker's eye and threw him down whereupon three passengers held the guy down.

Here, the pilot is immediately knocked out by the hijacker, and Anjana Vasan's character single-handedly takes him down with the finger to the eye, and saves the day all by herself, to the embarrassment and chagrin of her husband, who feels less manly and envious, though he knows it's wrong to feel this way.