This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
ED2013 5/5 Reviews ED2013 Theatre Reviews
Grounded (Gate Theatre London)
By Arjun Sajip | Published on Monday 19 August 2013
It takes real imagination to put on a feature-length production that contains one actor, no sets, and no props. Christopher Haydon is blessed with such imagination, and sound and vision, thanks to flawless technical cues, coalesce to form brilliant illuminations. However, none of this would work, were it not for Lucy Ellinson’s powerhouse performance. She plays ‘Pilot’, a confident, semi-androgynous pilot with much pent-up aggression, who is put in charge of a drone with which to kill remotely-selected targets. Her juggling of domestic life and life as a killer – unable to see the blue sky she loves – is what lends the play its poignancy. Themes of surveillance, paranoia and emotional fatigue infuse this very 21st-century play with painful relevance.
Traverse Theatre, until 25 Aug (not 12, 19), various times.
tw rating 5/5 | [Arjun Sajip]