Theatre: Grounded | the junction, Cambridge

An AC/DC riff jangles through my head as I leave the Cambridge junction following the penultimate performance of an 18 month UK tour of Grounded. It is an hour long journey in the hands of a reluctant UAV pilot from the US Air Force which leaves us with more than a few questions about the reality of modern warfare.

Director Christopher Haydon brings us up close to The Pilot, played by Lucy Ellison, as she comes to terms with being a member of the "chair-force" - a phrase she repeats with plenty of sarcasm and distaste. As a fully-fledged female Top Gun, our hero is full of all the bravado you'd expect from a highly trained military asset. She regales us with stories of her time out in the wide open "blue" (sky) as a fighter pilot, clearly smart and skilled and without an ounce of humility. Following a break from the war, she finds herself pregnant and somewhat excited about the prospect despite the risk of having to let go of her plane and "the blue" for a while. But a while gets longer as she returns to the job only to be told that she will be retrained as a drone pilot, working shifts from an air conditioned trailer outside of Las Vegas. She will stare at a grey screen all day following targets and convoys instead of soaring through the skies risking death and chancing glory.

For the duration of the play Ellison is imprisoned within a box of translucent scrim or gauze. Its not immediately apparent why she is caged there (as we enter the theatre she is standing in the box which is lit blue, like Damien Hirst's formaldehyde shark) but it becomes a visual pointer to the pilot's clipped wings. Her frustration only finds an outlet when given the order to kill "the guilty" from her black and white birds eye view. 

An expertly delivered powerful monologue along with simple but very modern staging and clever lighting make this play a real triumph. Its a performance that makes you think hard about our world, not just about morality and heroism of warfare in 2015 but also how we are increasingly living out our lives in front of a computer screen, detached from messy, beautiful, reality.