back

PRINT-FRIENDLY VERSION

EMAIL THIS STORY

MY weirdest night at the theatre ended with a sheet of paper being thrust into my hands as we left Charlie Victor Romeo. Having just witnessed, as entertainment, the crews' last few minutes in five catastrophic flights, the audience was being given the precise technical reasons for their gory deaths. "Failure to furnish the flight crew with a current altimeter setting", "ice accreted beyond the de-ice boots", "geese ingested into No 1 engine".

THEATRE Collective Unconscious Theatre Venue: Octagon Theatre, Perth Ends: February 21 Tickets: $20.25-$44 Bookings: (08) 9484 1133

Written on the paper is a disclaimer that the accident causes are derived from air safety sources, presumably to ensure that artistic licence doesn't wrongly apportion blame. No danger of that – there is no artistic licence in a spectacle that is all about verisimilitude, as real as if you'd been in the cockpit or downloaded the black box recording from some ghoulish internet site.

You are riveted to your seat, peering into the gloom at a small cockpit and a sweating captain and crew. You strain to catch the conversation over the deafening thrum of aircraft engine noise and the crackle of radio transmissions. You are there, hoping to God they keep this heap of junk up in the air. And then a crescendo of sound, and blackout. And it's on to the next disaster.

Charlie Victor Romeo arrived in Perth awash with hype about it being "embraced by the aviation community for its unsparing truthfulness and dedication to its non-sensational approach". Up to a point. It is true the dialogue is unembellished, featuring only the actual words used by these ill-fated Survivor of the Air contestants.

But non-sensational? Pigs can fly. The whole premise of the show is that we will be drawn in to watch doomed people, as macabre and mesmerising a spectacle as the images of September 11. Otherwise, why choose only one crash in six in which all the crew and passengers survive? Isn't voyeurism just the word for this sort of entertainment? If the New York-based Collective Unconscious had broadened their careful selection beyond a requirement for mass carnage, they might have found transcripts with more interesting or illuminating exchanges between crew than those we heard. Or maybe not. The problem is that people captured in a steel tubular tomb hurtling out of the sky have little time to ponder the meaning of it all. And the automaton-sounding air traffic controllers are hardly likely to engage them in gripping dialogue beyond: (crackle) "Do you mean you have no hydraulics? Over."

The most poignant moment was watching the copilot frantically fumbling her way through a flight manual, trying to read instructions that might save them. It's why air travel is everyone's deepest fear – we are helpless against the tyranny of technology gone haywire, especially when strapped into a seat 10,000 feet above the ground. Charlie Victor Romeo reminded us of this sensation rather better than a simulated computer game, so well in fact that it is being used in US flight training.

Great. But for a theatre audience, it's no more illuminating than an episode of Survivor or Big Brother, where the buzz is to watch people suffer or make mistakes in "real" life. Several people milling around afterwards – even those who liked it – declared it was "no more, no less" than what they expected. How sad.

back

PRINT-FRIENDLY VERSION

EMAIL THIS STORY