Full throttle ... Lucy Ellinson in Grounded in 2013. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The GuardianGeorge Brant’s electric monologue Grounded was one of the first plays to explore a new form of war. The playwright, actor Lucy Ellinson and director Christopher Haydon recall creating a fringe smash that channelled Top Gun
by Matt TruemanGrainy aerial footage is part of the lexicon of war now: pixelated people and flashes of bright white light. We have come to accept the idea of drone warfare – death delivered by remote control – as almost quotidian. But when Grounded premiered in 2013, that wasn’t the case. George Brant’s play was one of the earliest theatrical explorations of this unnerving new form of war. “That’s why it got people the way it did,” recalls its British director Christopher Haydon.
A monologue, Grounded told the story of an unnamed fighter pilot in the US Air Force who becomes pregnant unexpectedly, forcing her to stop flying. On returning from maternity leave, she’s co-opted into “the chair force” as a reluctant drone operator. “I stare at grey,” she says glumly; 12 hours a day, seven days a week. After each shift, she drives home to family life, a process that becomes increasingly dislocating. The play delivers a ferocious climax, as the pilot’s state of mind unravels.
‘This is exactly what I’m looking for’
Halfway through his first season in charge of the Gate, a tiny fringe venue above a pub in Notting Hill, west London, Haydon was scouting for solo shows. The Gate’s budgets are tight, and he had no cash left for a bigger cast. Over his tenure as artistic director, which finished last month, he often turned to American writers. “Their psychological landscape is bigger,” he argues, “and they’re not afraid to write massive plays.” Elizabeth Frankel, then literary manager at New York’s Public Theater, pointed him towards Grounded. “I remember downloading the PDF and thinking, this is exactly what I’m looking for.”
Brant, a former actor, hadn’t really had a hit as a playwright. He had been writing since the early 1990s and dropped lightweight theatrical parodies for sharper political plays soon after the 9/11 attacks. His play Grizzly Mama, a satire that had Sarah Palin in its sights, imagined an assassin and her family moving in next door to a politician to get a better shot. Grounded was a step change. “He’s such a gentle, mild-mannered guy,” says Haydon. “I’ve no idea where the pilot came from. He’s almost donnish and she’s so full-throttle.”
Brant wasn’t anti-drone exactly, and he still isn’t; he is not “Pollyanna enough” to rule out their use altogether. He did have increasing concerns though. “People seemed happy not to have to think about it,” he recalls, via Skype from his home office. “We were being told this was working and that was that.” On the wall behind him, a drone hovers ominously in a Grounded poster. In his first year in power, then president Barack Obama deployed more drones than George Bush had during his whole presidency. “This was a new technology, and we were the ones setting a moral precedent,” says Brant.
Grounded’s first audiences checked that drones were real post-show – a mark of how little they figured in the public consciousness. Brant spent six months researching. There were YouTube compilations of drone explosions set to heavy metal, glorified like gaming footage, and a government-issued picture book aimed at school kids. That drone operators worked on American soil came as a surprise, as did the fact they could get PTSD. “No one ever dreamed of that when they were initially used. The idea was to keep the pilot safely out of the way.”
‘Maternity, sexuality and the warrior’
Brant came across a photograph showing a fighter pilot in her mid-to-late thirties. She’s in her flight suit, carrying a helmet. She stares down the lens without smiling, both assertive and at ease, but the first thing you notice is her belly. Her suit’s open and she’s pregnant. Her bump is the same shape as her helmet. “It’s just this amazing photo: maternity, sexuality and the warrior.” Brant had needed an “in”, a figure to embody the dilemmas drones posed. As he says, “it’s very hard to write a machine as a protagonist”. The image helped the play fall into place.
The pilot was Maj Stephanie Kelsen, Vapor to her peers, and pregnant at 37. She’d been in the US air force for 20 years, one of the few women flying military jets, and was facing the possibility that she might not fly again. By the time she asked photographer Shlomit Levy Bard to take her portrait, her suit wouldn’t zip up. Behind her, the background is bleached out in a blinding white sky. The photographer told the New York Times that she had wanted “a feeling of the vastness that [Kelsen] experiences while flying”. Brant clung to that. His pilot struggles to sum up the sensation of flight. “You are the blue,” she stutters. “You are alone in the vastness and you are the blue.”
The character description is instructive. It’s startlingly precise, specifying her 1.5 mile run-time (13 minutes, 56 seconds or less) and the number of press-ups (50) and push-ups (27) she should complete in a minute. Brant remembers the actor who played the pilot, Lucy Ellinson, apologising. She could only do so many press ups.
Brant says he wrote the play “in a bit of a fever” in a rented room in Baltimore, “staring across a grey sky at a prison across the highway”. His pilot talks of being “asleep at the screen”. Brant knows the feeling. “I just sat down and went for it. A lot came in that I wasn’t expecting.” There was then a year of redrafting, “honing and refining the play down to its most active state”.
That was what did it for Haydon, how tight the play felt. “I don’t like reading plays and I find that, if they don’t hold you, your attention can slip quite easily. Grounded just really gripped me.” He knew exactly where it should be staged: Edinburgh, specifically the Traverse. The length was right, the form was self-aware, the politics were urgent. “I remember ringing [the playwright] Adam Brace and saying, ‘I’ve just found a play that’ll win a Fringe First.’”
The pilot was always Ellinson’s part. “I read it and immediately thought of her,” says Haydon. The two of them had worked together before – she lay bedbound in his Trojan Women, and appeared in Niklas Rådström’s clinical dissection of the James Bulger case, Monsters . Ellinson had just been touring #Torycore, a piece in which George Osborne’s speeches are performed to noise metal, and that made Haydon’s mind up. “I’d never seen that level of ferocity in her before.”
‘She makes no apologies whatsoever’
“I expected the monologue you expect as a female actor,” says Ellinson. “Nine pages in, an insight into the character’s fragility or frailty, some sort of hidden sadness – and it never came. This is a wilfully ambitious, enthusiastic human being with a completely different set of priorities and values to my own. She makes no apologies whatsoever.”
Grounded’s pilot matches her male colleagues flight for flight, drink for drink, and drives down the freeway blasting AC/DC. Her language is clipped and masculine, always unemotional. Brant remembers an interview with a pilot: “She said something like, ‘I’m not trying to be a guy. I am what I am: a fighter pilot.’ It was like ‘fighter pilot’ was her gender.”
Ellinson wore an androgynous haircut and stood in a rock star’s pose. Her pilot seemed to trip into motherhood, caught off guard by even the possibility of pregnancy. “Something’s breached,” she says, stunned. “Pink. Fuck.” She tries to hide her bump at work, ashamed of it. Brant wanted motherhood to jolt her. “It seemed important that she had experienced the exhilaration of flying before being forcibly assigned to the drone programme.” The freedom of flight – the speed, the G-force, the blue – slams to a stop. Ellinson wanted a taste of that and persuaded a friend to take her up in a light aircraft. “Nothing like a jet or an F16,” she remembers, “but take-off was a thrill. Mostly, it felt serene. It gives you perspective.”
That’s what the pilot loses. She sinks into the grey – this monochrome existence of 12-hour shifts, asleep at the screen. Brant had been surprised by the boredom involved; days staring down at the desert. Ellinson tracked an ex-pilot down online and swapped emails. “It sounded like a call centre job. You’re part of a machine. You’re monitored. Your toilet breaks are timed.” At the same time, “that’s punctuated by extreme rushes of adrenaline that come from nowhere”.
Speed is of the essence in Brant’s script. It was one of the reasons a monologue appealed: that ability to “change scenes in a sentence”. It came to define the character. “Things happen very fast for her, as they would for a fighter pilot going however many miles an hour.” The pilot speaks in half-sentences, half-thoughts, always moving on. “She misses things,” says Brant. Just as she drops a bomb and speeds off before it hits, she gets home and her daughter’s in a “big girl’s bed”. It’s as if time warps. One line shows how: “First. Few. Years.” Haydon made Ellinson add a question mark – as if it came as a shock.
Haydon wanted to put the pilot in a cube of some kind: “This is a woman that lives her life in a series of boxes.” Brant was wary that encasing one person on stage might diminish the play’s power and, frankly, get in the way. “If we don’t connect with her, there’s nothing,” he explains. The job of creating it fell to designer Oli Townsend. It’s several things at once, he points out: a plinth and a prison, but also a frame designed to contain and compress the pilot, in theory intensifying the play’s power.
‘We called them shizzle moments’
Townsend’s work tends to be vivid and poppy, often using light, and neons in particular, to shoot some colour through a set. From “the blue” to “the grey”, colour is a motif throughout Grounded. A grey gauze box, see-through when lit up from inside, needed something else: a video floor. Light and projection would, at times, transform the physical cube into a psychological space, even a virtual world. “We called them shizzle moments,” says Townsend. “Moments designed to punctuate the script.” Lighting designer Mark Howland decided they wouldn’t use blue until they absolutely had to.
They rehearsed through a heatwave in a room without air-conditioning in Deptford, south-east London. Brant called it “our little sweatbox”. He was quietly alarmed by how small the cube would be. Taped out on the floor it looked tiny. “How’s Chris going to find variety?” he wondered.
Rehearsing a solo show is its own particular skill, Haydon says. A director’s job, usually, is to create a neutral space for actors where their processes can meet. “With a monologue, it’s completely different,” he says. “You’ve got to create a space where the performer can lead the process.”
Ellinson built a string of mental images and associations that sat alongside the text; emotional mementos, almost. Mid-performance, she swished through them. Haydon likens it to “a Rolodex in her head”. They chopped the script up and stuck it round the walls. Over rehearsals, it grew into a sculpture. They’d add pictures and connecting strings, move paragraphs high and low to map the pilot’s mental state and splash colour where colour came in. Ellinson marked every mention of an eye with a peacock feather. Haydon smiles: “We ended up with this amazing thing.”
Haydon spent the last week repeating a mantra: “Harder, faster, louder. Harder, faster, louder. We took 20 minutes off the run time.” One night, the team watched Top Gun together – not entirely ironically. “Whatever you think of its politics, it’s a well-made film,” Haydon insists. “It doesn’t waste a line.” On her bedroom door in Edinburgh, Ellinson stuck a picture of Tom Cruise as Maverick.
The play’s sense of speed cuts to the core of drone warfare: a world moving too fast, technology speeding into the future unchecked. “It’s about being in control,” says Haydon. The pilot is, then she’s not. “She thinks she’s flying the drone, but actually the drone’s flying her.”
Grounded was a huge hit in Edinburgh in 2013, winning that Fringe First award, and went on to the Gate theatre, London, later in the year before being staged in the US. It is now back at the Gate for another run. Christine Lagarde saw in Washington, as did numerous Pentagon officials. Since its premiere, it has had almost 100 productions worldwide. At the Public Theater in New York, Anne Hathaway played the pilot, backed by vast video screens. Brant’s working on a screenplay for her and is also turning it into an opera, with Fun Home composer Jeanine Tesori writing the score. “I can’t wait to hear that first note,” Brant beams. “It’s far beyond anything I ever imagined.”
- Grounded is at the Gate theatre, London, until 25 March. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
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