THERE'S
a speech in David Greig's play San Diego about the way passengers
regard airline pilots with a sense of awe. "The passengers don't want
to see the pilot," says one character. "They hear the pilot's voice on
the Tannoy, they imagine a man in control."
He's
right. We would rather not know that the person behind the uniform is
as human as the rest of us, who in an emergency behaves with much the
same mixture of adrenalin and panic.
Not so Bob Berger. When the New York director stumbled across the transcript of an aeroplane's black box recorder
in a book shop in 1999, it struck him he was reading the raw material
for a play. With colleagues from Collective Unconscious theatre
company, he set about researching similar transcripts detailing the
crucial minutes leading up to aeroplane crashes and near misses.
Narrowing down their selection to six stories, they presented them as
Charlie Victor Romeo, a verbatim drama that showed that real life
emergencies have a power more compelling than any disaster movie.
"What
I love about this play is there's a bait and switch," he says. "The
bait is the layman's understanding of what the play is about. When we
think about aeroplane emergencies, we think about what John Wayne would
do. But we remove all of the technology and present the people and what
they're doing. The culture has all sorts of preconceived notions about
the subject – some of which are true – and what they see in the play is
something that connects them."
The stories are as frightening as
any piece of fiction, but what gives them their special character, says
Berger, are the banal details, the jokes and the quirky human moments.
The play has turned into a cult hit among airline staff, while it is so
instructive as a lesson in how to behave in a crisis that the US Air
Force uses a video of the show as a teaching aid.
Contrary to
what you'd expect, spending 90 minutes contemplating the proximity of
death is likely to increase your confidence in air travel. "The play
can be very scary," says Berger. "The sound design is very loud and
accurate – it can be really stressful – but the message is to respect
the people you entrust with your life when you see what they do in that
moment of crisis. A lot of people come up to us afterwards and say they
feel much safer."
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Charlie Victor Romeo,
Underbelly's Pasture, Edinburgh, Thursday until August 25 (not 12),
7.40pm. Scotland on Sunday is proud to be media partner of Underbelly
2008
•
www.underbelly.co.uk/edinburgh/The full article contains 449 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.