Theatre review: BRACE BRACE

My last trip to David Byrne's (not that one) first season at the Royal Court is for Oli Forsyth's BRACE BRACE, the story of a young couple surviving a hijacking only to face unexpected consequences in the rest of their lives, and Daniel Raggett's production which ramps up the tension and twists - but can't disguise the gaping plot holes. Sylvia (Anjana Vasan) and Ray (Phil Dunster*) are flying to their honeymoon when a lone, mentally ill man manages to take over the plane, briefly looking like he'll bring it down. Ray gets knocked out when trying to stop the hijacker but Sylvia manages to defeat him, becoming a popular have-a-go hero in the press. Inevitably it puts a strain on their relationship, and at first it looks like this will take the form of Ray's wounded pride at being written out of the story in favour of his wife as sole heroine, while she takes it in her stride.

But this gets flipped when the hijacker is released improbably quickly thanks to a mental health diagnosis, and all the trauma Sylvia's been suppressing floods back. As Ray tries to get their normal lives back, she spirals into anger and conspiracy theories.

There's a lot to like about BRACE BRACE, from the wittiness of the dialogue as Dunster and Vasan introduce their characters as a charming, likeable couple, to the inventiveness of the staging: Anna Reid's design pushes the audience right up into the rafters to create a split-level set, with a steep platform that the actors go onto for the more dramatic scenes. It's used to particularly good effect in the scenes of the plane actually going down, and brings a dynamic, action movie quality that's hard to pull off in a space as intimate as this.

The point the play's trying to make is a little bit harder to pin down, but eventually it does tie into not only PTSD, but also conspiracy theories - egged on by the pilot of all people (Craige Els, playing all the supporting roles including the hijacker,) Sylvia doubles down on the idea that because nobody else feels exactly the same way she does about the events, something must be being hidden from her. Although in this particular story the conspiracies she dives into involve the direct cause of her trauma, you can easily enough imagine this being a coping strategy for people who feel they're not being listened to for any other reason.

Where Forsyth's writing really lets the play down is in the plotting: I mentioned above the implausibility of a high-profile psychiatric patient who nearly killed hundreds of people being released into the community while the story is still in the news cycle; for me it's the point where the demand to suspend disbelief tips over into the ridiculous, but it's nowhere near the first: This appears to be present-day, and while I imagine that a couple of decades post-9/11 it's possible to put a bottle of shampoo in your luggage without security releasing the hounds, it's still not the 1950s where a passenger could ask to be let into the cockpit to share cigars and cocktails with the captain. Yet the hijack happens when the flight deck door is, I don't know, just left on the latch, so a man wanders in and throttles the pilot. It's a long-haul commerical flight but no, there doesn't appear to be a copilot, never mind autopilot.

Tragedy averted, the passengers aren't whisked off to hospital† but carry on their holiday as normal; they don't get counselling, but they do get 1 (one) complimentary drink. Later we find out the airline's screening process is to drag anyone who looks a bit shifty up to meet the captain before take-off so he can decide if they're a terrorist or not, because not only do pilots need to know how to fly planes, they're also fully-qualified psychiatrists/mind-readers who can make a diagnosis in ten seconds^{[citation needed]}.

It's not so much that the plot has holes in it, as that the hole has bits of plot in it, and it asks the audience to accept such a barrage of implausible events I had to wonder if we were meant to question the reliability of the narrators. Ray does at one point ask Sylvia if her meeting with the captain actually happened, but most of the story is corroborated by both leads, regardless of their different reactions to them. On top of which there's very little in Raggett's production to suggest we're in any kind of dreamlike, misremembered reality. So overall quite a strange experience; certainly enjoyable and brilliantly staged, with predictably engaging lead performances from Dunster and Vasan, but if it was meant to be taking place in an alternate universe where common sense went to die, we probably needed a few more clues to that.

BRACE BRACE by Oli Forsyth is booking until the 9th of November at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs.

Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.

*who's done well for himself since Phill and I saw him on stage in 2016 and ended up mainly talking about his arse; now he gets to go on Off Menu and they mainly talk about his arse

†it's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now