'Brace Brace' review — a plane hijacking sends a marriage crashing to earth in this propulsive new thriller

Read our review of Brace Brace, starring Phil Dunster, Anjana Vasan and Craige Els, now in performances at the Royal Court to 9 November.

Have you ever experienced something so nerve-shredding that the fallout from it all but consumes you? That vertiginous feeling underpins every bracing moment of Brace Brace, the lean, mean, 75-minute play from Oli Forsyth that follows on from Giant in once again making the Royal Court a theatrical must.

The two shows, jointly inaugurating David Byrne’s new regime at this address, could scarcely be more different. Whereas Mark Rosenblatt’s play is largely sedentary, Forsyth and his director, Daniel Raggett, send their three characters hurtling with often whiplash velocity across a traverse staging marked out by Anna Reid’s angled set.

Its slope suggests a runway on the one hand, a plunge into the abyss on the other. Both make sense given the disorientation that soon sets in, the good cheer of the opening sequence notwithstanding. Indeed, more than once, Ray (Ted Lasso’s Phil Dunster) and his wife Syl (Anjana Vasan, an Olivier winner last year for A Streetcar Named Desire) alert us that something bad is about to happen, though it’s some while before we come to clock the awful reckoning of a narrative fuelled by a propulsive energy worthy of the Greeks.

The central couple, it seems, have set off on their honeymoon on a 12-hour flight violently interrupted when an attempted hijacking sends the aircraft plummeting towards the sea. It’s giving nothing away to report that the couple survive, but does their marriage?

That is soon thrown into doubt by the cunningly constructed hairpin turns with which Forsyth springs many a surprise. You’d think a married couple would respond as one towards an attempted killer with whom Syl has engaged in the moment rather more than anyone should ever have to do.

But no. Ray speaks of “romance and terror [as] a spicy mix”, but the incident in fact pushes the pair some decisive distance apart. He takes the vaguely zen-like view that the occurrence was one of those things, however horrible at the time, from which one must move on: “A plane fell out of the sky, and we happened to be on it.”

Syl can’t let the experience go and takes to the airwaves as a reluctant media figure whose gathering thirst for retribution ends up clouding her reality. Before long, the play is seen functioning to varying degrees as a spectral-laden thriller, anatomy of a marriage, and portrait of incipient psychosis, Ray’s assessment of his wife’s “emotional incontinence” drawing a collective intake of breath from the audience seated ringside, as if auditors to the unspeakable.

Some will take the text more or less at face value: how will this duo respond as and when they next get on a plane? But the play movingly occupies a more abstract realm, as well, forcing questions about the unknowability of humankind, both from people you don’t recognise (the hijacker) and those you do (a spouse).

It’s difficult to imagine the writing in better hands, here abetted by a creative team that includes the Tony-winning sound designer Paul Arditti (Billy Elliot) returning to the theatrical fold. Craige Els takes a break from musicals (Matilda, amongst others) to tackle a troublesome array of men – the hijacker just one of several – whilst Dunster and Vasan are in formidably take-no-prisoners form as a twosome whose once-airborne passions fall tragically, inevitably, to earth.

Brace Brace is at the Royal Court to 9 November. Book Brace Brace tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: Brace Brace (Photos by Helen Murray)