Grounded

The emotional whiplash from this grippingly intense one-woman play—making its UK debut at this year’s festival thanks to London’s Gate Theatre—almost hurts. The boundless blue of the sky turns to the pink of a pregnancy test and, finally, to camera grey as a drone devastates foreign lands and the life of the grounded female US fighter pilot operating it.

The use of unmanned drones in war zones has filled headlines, but American writer George Brant wisely forgoes soundbite scripting for a laser-sighted focus on Lucy Ellinson’s nameless Pilot – an adrenalin junkie in need of a new fix when childbirth ends the sonic boom of her Top Gun lifestyle.

She's our lens onto a chilling new world where national borders have faded as warfare becomes an endless shifting frame from one desert to the next. She becomes a self-professed desk-bound god who gets a kick out of smiting "the guilty" from her "eye in the sky" even as her daughter’s face starts to blur with her onscreen targets.

Ellinson is mesmerising as Pilot – sardonic, swaggering and fragile as glass, restlessly pacing the grey-hued transparent cube that comprises the set. It’s an effective way of conveying the character’s claustrophobia and her estrangement from life beyond her joystick.

Director Christopher Haydon’s edgily paced production, with its staccato bursts of rock music, mirrors Brant’s spiky writing, which touches on the relationship between gender, motherhood and career without preachiness. Powered by Ellinson, this show soars across utterly believable territory.