Charlie Victor Romeo
July 19, 2008
Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds to 19 July,
Mercury Theatre, Colchester 21-22 July,
Cow Barn, Edinburgh (Venue 300) 31 July-25 August
Were you about to jet off on holiday? Or winging your way to the Edinburgh Festival? After seeing the Scamp Theatre production of Charlie Victor Romeo, you may wish to reconsider the mode of your return journey. Train, bus or coach, perhaps? Air travel might never again seem to be a viable option.
The play’s dialogue is taken from edited transcripts of six actual aircraft emergencies. Its title comes from the initials of the cockpit voice recorder, popularly known as the “black box”. Three of the six flights ended with total fatalities. Two had some survivors as well as deaths. Only one landed safely, with just a single person slightly injured.
That’s the one we start with, in this unusual case of beginning a play with a happy ending. The spread of factors which led to each catastrophe ranges from shoddy maintenance through natural causes such as bird flocks or icing to control tower misunderstandings or flight crew errors. As the pilots and officers hold their increasingly fraught and overlapping dialogues with airport controllers, you can see that all the computerised technology on the ground and in the skies cannot prevent human mistakes or material catastrophes.
Not all the dialogue spoken by Debbie Troche, Nora Woolley, Paul Bargetto, Patrick Daniels, Irving Gregory, Derek Wright and Sam Zuckerman is easy to understand. That’s not because there are so many technical phrases but rather because of the speed of exchanges blurred by mouthpieces and head-phone static. It’s a bit like an operatic quartet or sextet; all the characters sing at the same time, but each of their phrases is individualised. Only one character could express him- or herself in that particular way at that particular time.
Jamie Mereness and Kevin Reilly have created a sound design which set the Georgian foundations of the Theatre Royal throbbing. In a small Edinburgh lower-ground studio the experience should be even more realistic and unsettling. There is no disguising of the grinding shock of impact or the seconds preceding it. Though I did enjoy the whispered comment from someone sitting in front of me – “poor birds!” – as the screeching geese were sucked into the engine.
Bill Ballou and Cecile Boucher’s set is simple – the audience is looking at the pilots’ cockpit head-on, with all the complication of instruments implied rather than shown. It’s as though we were perched on the nose of the aircraft. That’s an extremely unsettling place to be, even on terra firma.
reviewed by Anne Morley-Priestman