GROUNDED (Lucy Ellinson as a US drone pilot)

I didn’t manage to see Grounded but my friend Peter Olive sent me a review.

As the audience file into Notting Hill’s tiny Gate Theatre, we are deafened by power chords of American rock music. There is something immediately oppressive about the space.  A woman in a khaki flying suit stands to attention in a gauze-covered cube.  She is bathed in the light of a computer screen – in fact displayed in the glowing, pixelated floor on which she stands.  She is to prove a feisty, defiant female, acclimatised to the amorality of the American military.

Her hour-long monologue will comprise the entire play.  She, a pilot of an F-16 jump jet, begins with her ecstatic love of flying, describing the joy of the sky, emphasising

“The blue. You ARE the blue. You are alone in the vastness and you are the blue.”

Complication arises when this fearless young pilot explains how she became unintentionally pregnant. She admits being horrified by her own sentimentality when the child arrives, but is happy with motherhood and a live-in boyfriend.  When she attempts to return to work however, her task has changed.  She is to fly a drone.

Feeling humiliated and betrayed at being sent to join the “chairforce”, she is required to move to the location of the bunker, Las Vegas (incongruous somehow, given its frivolous associations.)  She drives daily from her boyfriend and baby to be trained to fly the drone – which it is stressed to her, is worth $11 million. She describes how first, she and her comrades are required to sit in a row of desks – “like a typing class” – to learn the remote controls of an aircraft on the other side of the world.  Drones, she explains, can stay in the air for more than 40 hours at a time, hounding individuals in cars for miles, hovering on the spot or peering at civilians at close range.  From her computer screen, she can see every detail on the ground with crystal clarity, down to the brand name on a victim’s coke can.  Each morning, our pilot kisses her child goodbye and goes to war.

Eventually there comes her first killing of The Guilty, as she has been trained to call her targets.  She laughs at how her pulse quickened as she closed in for the kill: what risk was there to her in the safety of a room in Las Vegas?  With her second extermination, she notices how far their body parts fly.  “Guilty body parts” she hastens to remind herself, slightly unnerved while inspecting the scene.

“We drone gods, we do that a lot – linger over what we’ve done.”

Our pilot begins to develop a conscience.  “It’s not fair” she realises.

“We should make an announcement.  Attention, people of the grey desert: The Moment You Step Outside You Are Under Suspicion.” 

As she drives home each day, she begins to visualise her own car being watched from the sky, just as she too follows Jeeps through Afghanistan on her screen.  Simply the sight of a security camera in a department store moves her to tears, a reminder of ubiquitous, inescapable surveillance.  She can no longer sleep. She hallucinates her daughter’s death, her home life interspliced with shifts in a war zone. She remarks at one point

It would be a different book, the Odyssey, if Odysseus had come home every day…every single day.  

Finally, after days hovering, waiting for a man to leave his car (enabling ‘target certainty’) she snaps. As the vehicle finally stops and waits outside the target’s house, she is paralysed with empathy.  The truth hits her, that all he wants is to glimpse his wife and daughter one last time – knowing that as soon as he exits the vehicle, he’ll be obliterated.  Sure enough, a little girl emerges, and the pilot imagines her own daughter.  Desperately trying to avert the child’s death, she finds she cannot: it is revealed that her own drone has been followed. Her superiors had suspected she was cracking up for weeks.  With chilling subtlety of sound design, an echoey reverb in the last scene informs us that the pilot is now herself inside a cell.

This was potent drama: a pitiless, sadistic world presented in vivid detail without partiality.  With an outstanding performance from Lucy Ellinson and clever use of a simple, slick stage design, I was taken on a mimetic journey: for an hour, that woman’s life was mine to experience.  Exceptionally good and very, very frightening.

Director: Christopher Haydon
Writer: George Brant
Starring: Lucy Ellinson