Brace Brace, Royal Court Upstairs: This implausible PTSD drama is a plane crash
At the heart of Oli Forsyth’s new play is a choice. You can let yourself become defined by something appalling that once happened to you, and risk allowing it to consume you entirely; or you can fight against that happening. It sounds easy, but there’s a catch. What if only you know the full horror of what happened, and no one else does? How can you possibly get over something to which everyone else is oblivious? It would be like the thing itself never even occurred.
These questions swirl like wind turbulence through Forsyth’s psychological thriller, which centres on a plane hijacking. Two newlyweds, Ray and Sylvia, are flying somewhere lovely for their honeymoon when a man barrels into the cockpit and knocks out the pilot. Sylvia somehow tackles the hijacker and rouses the pilot; in the melee, the hijacker nearly chokes Ray to death. Disaster is averted in the final seconds and everyone is safe but Ray and Sylvia, who hours previously were brimming with optimism for their new life together, are shattered. Ray initially feels erased by Sylvia’s new found celebrity, but when Sylvia learns the hijacker has got off scot free, on the grounds he suffered a psychotic episode, it’s she who succumbs to mind-eating panic and paranoia.
Director Daniel Raggett attempts to make all this as exciting as possible: the upstairs space has been reconfigured in the shape of a plane cabin; Paul Arditti’s immersive soundscape with its whirring jet engines and ambient aircraft background noise add a touch of uncanny, thrilling realism. Which is just as well because the plot is preposterous. Not the hijacking – Forsyth himself experienced something very similar – but its dramatisation and aftermath, which includes a scarcely credible TV interview with Sylvia, the equally hard-to-believe fate of the hijacker, who is inexplicably afterwards allowed to roam free, and the end reveal.
Perhaps much of this is indeed what happened in Forsyth’s experience, but the clumsy execution, which relies on dramatic spectacle at the expense of narrative detail and thought-through exposition, undermines his play’s psychological credibility.
Which is a pity, because the respective struggles of Ray and Sylvia hint at interesting broader questions beyond the specifics of PTSD: the question of who gets to determine the nature of someone else’s experience, the very contemporary sense of clashing parallel versions of the truth. Anjana Vasan and Phil Dunster invest Sylvia and Ray with the right mix of perky charisma and curdling anguish, and have evident chemistry; Forsyth is nimble with dialogue. But the plot? It’s a plane crash.
Until Nov 9. Tickets: 020 7565 5000; royalcourttheatre.com