Grounded

Perhaps it is the intimacy of the tiny theatre; or the choice of brave and confronting plays; or the sheer weight of extraordinary talent that makes Red Stitch the premier independent theatre company in Victoria. Red Stitch has nothing to prove, except to themselves, and so they keep raising the bar of excellence and pole-vaulting over it.

Grounded is not just a monologue; it is a beautifully structured one-woman play. Writer George Brant, who completed the actual writing in just two days after months of research, has rightfully received rave reviews wherever Grounded has played. Embracing both the crude and the exquisitely lyrical, it’s a marvellous exploration of numerous issues: how women define themselves in a man’s world, the struggle between duty and morality; work and motherhood, and the legal right to commit murder without danger or fear of personal retribution. These are heady issues and for 80 minutes the audience, in all its complacency, is confronted with them. It’s impossible not to think of them and question your perceptions hours after the performance is finished. If war is reduced to a video game, how great will be the addiction?

The pilot (cleverly never named) is an F16 fighter pilot, a Rock Star in a world of men. She’s Tom Cruise in Top Gun, only much taller. She is addicted to “The Blue”, the sky, which she feels she owns. She’s brash and arrogant, and she’s earned that right. When she finds out she is pregnant she also discovers that she has fallen in love, something that was never on her radar. She marries and has a daughter “Samantha” but she’s itching to get back to “The Blue”. The problem is that, when she is re-assigned, she is re-trained as a drone pilot, now part of the “chairforce”. She’s  GROUNDED, operating from a dark caravan in the middle of the Nevada Desert and living in Las Vegas. Blue becomes endless grey. What happens from that point on charts the slow disintegration of a woman and an officer. Sucked into playing  “computer games”, she becomes more than a Rock Star. She is God, dispensing life and death in a nanosecond, with only her uniform to remind her of reality. It is a classic clash of the external and internal battles all of us must face in one form or another.

Kate Cole gives a remarkable performance as “The Pilot.” She makes the character totally real and frighteningly vulnerable as we watch her trying to cling to the last vestiges of who she once was. At times she is brash and unlikeable, clearly “acting” for her audience. At others she is touchingly frail and honest as she battles with the power that she’s been given; death without personal retribution. She wears the pilot’s uniform as if it is her skin. It doesn’t hurt that she is startlingly beautiful; it accents the loss of her vitality, her sense of purpose, as she seems to lose her life-force before us without ever leaving the stage.

Kirsten von Bibra, with a rich background in teaching some of our most eminent actors, is a fine director and the perfect choice to replace Tanya Dickson. Her blocking is impeccable and it’s clear she’s had a strong hand in exploring the character and encouraging Kate Cole’s bravery in exposing so much of the inner battle.

The white box set design by Matthew Adey is the perfect canvas for his stunning lighting plot which creates just the right atmosphere and illusion for us. What a force  this creative trio makes. This is theatre of the highest order.

Red Stitch is fund-raising to help pay their actors. For 10 weeks work each actor earns the equivalent of one week’s basic wage. Why, then, do they do it? They do it because they have the need to express, to interpret, to create those elements which all of us recognise but few are able to realise. There is no life without drama, no way to learn or move forward. Theatre is our life’s blood, whether we realise it or not. Mostly it keeps us alive, and grounded…occasionally it elevates us, lifts us far above the earth, shows us “The Blue” and allows us to break free and fly. That is what Red Stitch gives us time after time. Perhaps it’s time for us to give something back.

Coral Drouyn

Photographer: Jodie Hutchinson