Grounded – Review

From the outset this piece of theatre leaves you feeling alienated and disconcerted: the first thing you see when you enter the room is a large cube with a lone figure standing inside looking at members of the audience as they file in, and in the background there is the fierce pounding of heavy metal rock music which is so loud that you cannot talk to the person sitting next to you, but are instead forced to stare at the cube and wait for the show to begin.

When it does the audience is confronted with a young woman that loves being inside a plane and takes great pleasure in her life in the military, but it is to Lucy Ellinson’s credit that the character she plays evolves over the course of the performance, as this woman’s job changes from soaring over the sky to pushing the button in a control room that will fire a rocket at a distant target in a faraway desert.

Curiously though, it is not actually the moments where she is recounting her work as a drone pilot that affected me the most, but instead when she speculates on the difference between her life at home and her life at work. You almost felt a wave of shock run through the audience as people came to terms with the idea of a person sitting in front of a screen and killing people before returning home to their loved ones each night.

Yet it would be wrong to say that the only emotion this play makes you feel is horror. At points the audience was made to laugh as Ellinson’s character bragged about her husband finding her uniform attractive, or joked with us about being demoted to the “chair-force”. There are also moments where you feel almost compelled to side with the pilot as she goes after her targets, and this forces you into a direct confrontation with your conscience as you find yourself being swept up with the character’s enthusiasm to obtain another kill, and yet just as that distant ‘boom’ goes off when the rocket hits, Ellinson’s pilot is there staring back at you with wide eyes, and you’re forced to reconsider just what it was that you had been pushed into encouraging.

The play keeps coming back to the idea of being watched: there’s the pilot watching from the sky, there is the person at mission command watching the pilot, and then there is us, the audience, sitting and watching the play. By the end of the night you’re left feeling haunted and responsible, and when Ellison’s character screams “I know you watch me” it is as though we’re being brought into the play and forced to own up to the actions of our armed forces in the Middle East, which seem so much more morally ambiguous than they did before the lights went down.

Grounded runs at Warwick Arts Centres until the 10^th October and continues its UK tour until the end of January 2015.