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Johnny Depp has become, in his young middle age, like a star of the movies’ golden period
Public Enemies
Music
this was a triumph of eye-popping production and exhausting choreography
Madonna
Theatre
If his smug stage persona is tricky to warm to, his skill, and the snappiness of Andy Nyman’s direction, are spot-on
Derren Brown
If you are feeling totally fed up with your lot at the moment with the economic squeeze - go see this film
I thought this was an excellent, powerful production. The staging and acting were superb, it is well worth going to see
Absolutely AMAZING show that went like a train for three hours solid and didn't waiver once!
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Description: Aboriginal walk through memory, dreams and fear from Matt Cameron.
The surrealistic title of this fascinating memory-play by the Australian Matt Cameron, signals its liberation from tired conventions of realistic theatre.
Soutra Gilmore's raked stage design suggests the runway for a plane about to take off. The play itself climbs to wild heights of dream, fantasy and memory and leaves you stumbling, true to life, though not to realism, in a no-man's-land of uncertainty.
Cameron takes his basic leap of inspiration from two mysterious disasters: a never-explained TWA plane crash and the case of an Australian woman who had to wear a pressurised body suit after being set alight by her boyfriend.
Ranging between past and present, relying upon dreams' coincidences, Cameron links these two events through the figure of Titus, a young man who was killed in the TWA crash or went missing. The play implies that the motives for people's extreme behaviour are as unfathomable and hard to elucidate as the reasons for a plane's downfall.
The first scene sets a tone of ominous and eerie surrealism: the plane crashes before our very ears, moments after Irene, Titus's burned, bandaged girl-friend has a premonition of the disaster; Titus, a passenger on the doomed flight, suddenly materialises in a picture being painted by his onearmed father.
The young man then assumes human form, his skin peeling in the crash's fire, as he flails at T S Eliot's "still-point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless". Scenes from Titus's childhood, with vignettes of his mother's frustration and his father Stanley's aggressive hostility, are reenacted in parallel to a search for the young man's body. Cameron reaches heights of the visionary macabre when Stanley and Irene trawl through the plane's debris. "Breathe normally though death is imminent," the flight attendant gruesomely instructs.
No illumination is achieved through the glass eye's fallible perspective. But Erica Whyman's production, though handicapped by its crass decision to go for British accents, casts a nightmarish glow. Ian Drysdale and Sandy McDade as Titus and Irene are riveting exponents of Cameron's remarkable imagination.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
