Airsick
Bush Theatre, Autumn 2003

Emma Frost's black comedy, directed at the Bush by Mike Bradwell, touches on a number of themes, not all of them fully integrated. At various times our attention is drawn to the hard work of sustaining relationships, the impulse to avoid or even sabotage them because failure is easier, and the sense that much of life is out of our hands, the inevitable product of passing some point of no return sometime in the past.

Lucy (Celia Robertson) is beginning a live-in relationship with her American boyfriend Joe (Eric Loren), though Gabriel (Gideon Turner), who she bumped into at the airport, really seems a much more amiable guy. Complicating matters are her demanding and somewhat boorish father (Peter Jonfield) and her ditsy friend Scarlet (Susannah Doyle).

Blokeish Joe turns out to have more in common with father than daughter, and drifts away, and Gabriel shockingly proves less benign a comforter than he at first seemed. By the end, all the wrong people are happier than those who deserved happy endings, and at exactly what point things went sour remains as much a mystery as the black holes repeatedly invoked as symbols of inevitable doom.

Despite that dark summary, the play reaches repeatedly for a comic tone, primarily through punctuating scenes with extended bizarrely comic monologues, most often by the self-styled nymphomaniac Scarlet. These have the potential for being show-stoppingly funny, but only with a responsive audience.

If the audience is dead, as it was on the night I saw it, the poor actors don't have the stand-up comic's options of ad libbing or cutting the speeches short, but must soldier on, sinking ever deeper into painful silence. And with those failures deadening the mood, and without that leavening humour and the warmth it would bring to the characters, the body of the play remains distant from us, the story dragging or alienating us with its soap opera twists because it hasn't made contact with us.

It is to some degree unfair to judge a play on what might have been a bad night, but because I can only guess that it might work better with a more responsive audience, I can only very hesitantly suggest that it might be worth a visit

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Airsick - Bush 2003