CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO. To 25 August.

Tour.

CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO
created by Bob Berger, Patrick Daniels, Irving Gregory.

Tour to 25 August 2008.
Runs 1hr 20min No interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 18 July.

High octane, edge-of-seat reality.
It could have been the ghoulish side of verbatim theatre, the perfect night out after a day cruising motorways for crashes to gawp over. There’s something sinister in calling your company Collective Unconscious when they’re enacting 793 deaths (or ‘fatal injuries’) in under ninety minutes. Though, given the eleven people credited with developing Charlie Victor Romeo, there’s a creative side to the name.

All the words come from the black boxes of crashed planes (their Control Voice Recorders, geddit?). The six incidents take-off innocuously with general in-flight cabin banter, interrupted by the shock of hitting earth when the dials say it’s a thousand feet below, before running through edits that could seem splices of 12 years’-worth of airplane disaster movies – the crashes took place round the world between eighty-five and ninety-six.

But an eerie formality’s provided by the projections preceding each scene with flight details and cause of problem, returning after with news of outcome. Between comes the frantic human action, sometimes long, at others a brief, final snapshot.

Impending disaster has its own rhythm, running through surprise, ordered behaviour as experience and skills kick-in, growing increasingly pressured as options shut down, barely giving time to realise disaster’s in the wings. Sometimes there’s the punctuating counter-rhythm of ground-control calm, supporting with information, or infuriating with repeated questions.

All leading to the last adrenalin burst before the crunch comes, sometimes mid-sentence. The piece reaches its own climax, not as opportunistic voyeurism but tragic realisation of the impact of human error made miles away, technology failing (Arthur Miller’s Joe Keller should have lived to see this) or natural accident.

And the sense of human activity, concentration and co-operation on the dangerous edge of things, a sense heightened by this company’s remarkable ensemble playing, catching the lines of concentration, the separate strands playing-out simultaneously onboard and through radio-control, a world concentrated within the cockpit mock-up, and given further reality by Jamie Mereness’s remarkable soundscape, its engine-throbbing, vent-rustling, shrill-alarmed variety intensifying the urgency that can lie behind – or ahead of – the passenger-safety routine with which two flight attendants cheerily prelude troubles ahead.

Cast: Paul Bergetto, Patrick Daniels, Irving Gregory, Nora Woolley, Debbie Troche, Derek Wright, Sam Zuckerman.

Directors: Bob Berger, Patrick Daniels, Irving Gregory.
Designers: Bill Ballou, Cecile Boucher.
Lighting: Derek Wright.
Sound: Jamie Mereness.

2008-07-19 11:48:08