The fall-out when a flying ace joins the Chair Force
By Daniel Nelson
Drone pilots are becoming a useful source of drama. They offer the thrill of the chase, debates about the ethics of war, Image by photographer Iona Firouzabadi
Lucy Ellinson in Grounded
Conventional battles make powerful cinema but awkward theatre, whereas drones and their pilots make claustrophobic, contrived films but intense stage drama.
Last year I watched Drones, a film inspired by a play, in which an experienced operator shows the ropes to a woman who has flunked flying school and though set on proving herself develops doubts about collateral damage on the family of the human al-Qaeda target she has identified.
She is also the daughter of a decorated Vietnam Vet who intervenes on screen in an increasingly unlikely scenario that results in fisticuffs in the Las Vegas trailer.
The Deadline Hollywood website has reported that another film is being shot, about “a fighter pilot … who becomes a Las Vegas-based drone pilot. He fights the Taliban by remote control for twelve hours a day, then goes home to the suburbs and feuds with his wife and kids for the other twelve. He starts to question his mission, and asking himself if he is creating more terrorists than he is killing in a war seemingly without end.”
More recently a 30-minute video, 5000 Feet is the Best (a reference to the ideal flight altitude of a US Predator drone) was featured at the Imperial War Museum in London. It offered extracts from an interview with an unidentifiable operator who sent drones to targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan, linked by scenes of an actor leaving and entering the interview room in a Las Vegas hotel and offering other responses and anecdotes, which may or may not have been drawn from the real recollections. There was also documentary footage and fictionalised re-enactments that, for example, show how an attack might look in Nevada.
Now, Grounded at the Gate Theatre in London combines these elements in a one-woman show in which a flying ace (Lucy Ellinson, superb) gets pregnant and is forced to join the US Chair Force and fly an $11 million Reaper. Grim news indeed, as she describes not only staring at a screen for hours on end but no longer being a loner up in the Blue. She goes to war on a shift basis, clocking on and off and going home every day to husband and child.
As she says:
“It would be a different book
The Odyssey
If Odysseus came home every day
Every single day
A very different book.”
So the personal merges with the political and everything changes.
It’s a little over an hour, covers a lot of ground and raises a number of issues, including the role of women combatants. Once or twice George Brant’s script seems to have a hole in it but there’s no time to suspend belief as the pace of the piece hurtles onward.
Good writing, good acting, good production, good topic. Direct hit.
· Grounded is at the Gate Theatre, 11 Pembridge Road W11, until 30 May. Info: 7229 0706/ http://www.gatetheatre.co.uk/
· http://dronewars.net/ Drone Wars UK
blog comments powered by Disqus
