The Drone plays: “Landscape With Weapon” and “Grounded”

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American drama, Gate Theatre, George Brant, Joe Penhall, Lucy Ellinson, Tom Hollander

This week’s theatre-going included a piece called Grounded, written by George Brant and staged at London’s Gate Theatre as part of its “These American Lives” season. The Gate – for those of you unfamiliar with the landscape of British theatre – is a small (60 seats or so) theatre in Notting Hill which sits above a local pub. It has become one of home of American drama in the past year and recently gave a London premiere to Bruce Norris’s early play Purple Heart. The Gate seems to have an obsession with war and American drama as well because Norris’s play was set during Vietnam and Grounded makes major references to Iraq and the ongoing conflicts there and in Afghanistan. Grounded was also a one-woman show – performed as a brilliant tour de force by Lucy Ellinson – which (having merely skimmed the reviews and being attracted by its American-drama-in-Londonness) I thought was going to be largely about a female fighter pilot and her experiences in the US Air Force. Instead, it seemed to be a continuation of a conversation that had begun with Joe Penhall’s 2007 play for the National Theatre, Landscape With Weapon.

Being a news junkie and a sucker for a play mixing family with politics, I think Landscape With Weapon is one of the finest plays of the irritatingly-named “noughties”. It does that rare thing in British drama which uses a family dilemma to interrogate politics, in this case the moral dilemma of developing weapons of mass destruction. Penhall’s play revolves around two brothers – Ned and Dan – both of whom, in their respective professions are morally compromised (a device that keeps the one from taking the moral high ground and being “preachy”): Dan, a dentist who has found his way into administering botox as a moonlighting sideline and Ned, the play’s protagonist, who develops software used in drones.

Ned’s choice of language is initially circumspect, talking about the beauty of nature in the form of aviary swarms. Tom Hollander’s Ned jolted the audience into recognition with the abrupt introduction of “military technology” into the conversation with his brother, continuing to mix the harshness of the American – and it’s important that it was the American – military industrial complex with poetic descriptions of swarms. The conversation with Dan facilitated first a crisis of conscience in Ned by simply asking the question about the function of the pieces of machinery his brother designs:

Dan (increasingly worried) So…but, but these…drones…what do they actually do?

Ned All sorts of things. The point is that as a swarm they can do what they can’t do alone. A new behaviour emerges.

Dan Yes, but…exactly what are they being used for in the Middle East?

Ned Well, you know, they start out as surveillance vehicles but, you see, what they’ve done now is weaponised them…

Ned’s burgeoning crisis of conscience over his method of earning a living culminated in a meeting with a sinister pair of MoD bods keen to keep on the Americans’ good side, delivering Ned’s weaponised technology to the senior partner in the Special Relationship. After cajolings and threats from the MoD bods (British), Ned’s mental breakdown was complete. The key point for my purposes here is that Penhall’s play investigates the creation – specifically, its design – of the drone as a piece of machinery. Morally compromised through his active participation in the creation of weapons of self-destruction, Ned’s mental state deteriorates throughout the action until he is barely functioning through a combination of guilt and losing the battle with the American military industrial complex.

Penhall’s play was written in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, which has left a deep scar on the psyche of Britain and the US. Fast-forward to the Obama years and we come to the revelation that, as Ari Shapiro reported in this 2012 NPR piece, “The Obama administration’s use of drones to kill suspected terrorists in foreign countries may be President Obama’s biggest legacy in the fight against terrorism.” Where Landscape With Weapon delved into the theoretical possibility of how the drones Ned designed would be used, drones had become so prevalent in the discourse that Grounded unequivocally shows their usage.

Brant’s sole character – known only as The Pilot – is grounded due to pregnancy and redeployed to what she disgustedly refers to as “the Chair Force” – a base in the middle of the Nevada desert where drones are remotely controlled by USAF personnel who go home to their families at night – or as The Pilot says, home from the war. Like the structure of Penhall’s play, the audience watches the main character mentally deteriorate from a strong, confident person to someone who is mentally fragile. In Brant’s play, it is clear that The Pilot is suffering from PTSD just by sitting in the Chair Force.

What brings on the PTSD, however, is staring at a gray screen day after day and piloting the drones initially on surveillance ops – exactly how Penhall initially had Ned describe his weapons’ function, as surveillance tools. Yet Brant goes further than Penhall because he is dealing with the “real” drone and what gradually unfolds happens solely through language. Horrifying language in which The Pilot goes from simply watching the objects in a far away desert to pronouncing these moving objects “guilty” and blowing them to smithereens. At first it is chillingly dispassionate and triumphant, showing in no uncertain terms how compromised America herself is in her pursuit of her enemies; all from the comfort of a chair in a Nevada bunker. It ends with the personal; hallucinations of the face of her daughter that causes The Pilot to pull out of killing the Al Qaeda number 2 because his little girl is with him. Collateral damage ensues anyway and Grounded ends with The Pilot awaiting court martial.

What is noticeable is the progression from Penhall’s play about the theoretical use of drones to the actual depiction of the weaponised flying machines’ uses. Penhall’s 2007 play was a warning; Brant’s play is the reality. I can only hope there isn’t a stage three to this progression. Grounded shows us just how morally bankrupt we have become.

NB: There is an archive video of Joe Penhall’s Landscape With Weapon available for viewing at the National Theatre Archive. It’s a very funny, moving play and extremely well acted; it also has the most amazing and funniest food fight I have ever seen on any stage anywhere. (Not that there are a lot of food fights on stage).

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Fences by August Wilson at the Duchess Theatre, London, 25 July 2013

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Arthur Miller, August Wilson, Duchess Theatre, Fences, Lenny Henry, Paulette Randall, Tanya Moodie, William Shakespeare

I think the first thing to say about Paulette Randall’s stunning production of August Wilson’s Fences is that it is historic in one – possibly more than one – important way. Although the production began life at Bath’s Theatre Royal, its transfer into the West End makes her the first black woman to have EVER directed a play in the West End. (I’m also currently wondering whether this is the first time an August Wilson play has made it to the West End as well.)

Lenny Henry has – rightly – been praised for his performance as Troy, which I have to say is a monumental part and the time, energy, lines, physicality of it puts me in mind of the joke about Richard Burbage telling William Shakespeare to never do anything like that to him again after Richard III, who is also almost never off stage. But along with Lenny Henry’s tour de force stands that of the rest of the cast – each and every one of them turned in finely nuanced performances which I wish I could capture and bottle, or at least describe. Facial expressions, body language, and – in the case of Tanya Moodie’s Rose – a stillness as she watched events unfold around her, sometimes standing in the shadows on the other side of the screen door (the set was the front porch and yard of a modest house in Pittsburgh – and, speaking as someone from that part of Appalachia, the front of that house was very familiar).

Henry’s already tackled Othello, but with this Troy I would like to see him give King Lear a whirl. Troy’s journey is one that is not unfamiliar in African-American (and, as I see in news reports, also in the black British experience): a troubled past with crime figuring heavily in his early life, but by the time we – as audience – meet Troy he’s turned his life around and has held down a steady job and been married to Rose for 18 years. A core of disappointment eats away at Troy because he was never able to play professional baseball, something he puts down to the color barrier and which Rose strikingly says is because he had been too old by the time he got out of prison. Whatever the reason – and both are more than plausible – Troy is haunted by his failed dream.

There is nothing so viscerally raw in American drama as the failure of the American dream – Arthur Miller’s plays are infused with the consequences (think Willy Loman) and  Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins is about the extremes of what happens when people can’t get the prize purportedly offered by the American dream. One of Troy’s tragedies is that he stops his son from being recruited by a college football team – which would have been his ticket out of the working class environment with the chance of a college education. When he messes up his relationship with his wife, he is a truly broken man. Lenny Henry played the arc beautifully, beginning as a highly engaging and likable man to someone who nearly beats his son with a baseball bat.

Baseball and fences. Two other things that recur in the play. The American dream is predicated on home ownership and that home has a white picket fence around it. There was no Tom Sawyer moment with the fence that Troy is perpetually building, although it would not have been out of place. (Ignoring the racial implications of Mark Twain’s work here.) The baseball nuances I feel didn’t resonate very well with the audience this afternoon (the power of three strikes you’re out within the context of the play didn’t seem to raise the tension for those around us, although I was horrified; my knowledge of the Pittsburgh Pirates today as a multi-racial team made it difficult to hear Troy dismiss them as a white team). But you replace football with baseball and you’ve got the same analogy – it’s one of the ways (albeit highly unlikely to succeed) that children from underprivileged backgrounds can escape – and that is one of the ways I think the play speaks to a contemporary British audience. That and the ways in which we see Troy as both a human being and one whose race has clearly stopped him from trying for the American dream in full, despite at least attaining home ownership.

What I look forward to is having a conversation about August Wilson with someone who knew him very well. And talking about the ways in which his plays have become important to British theatrical life. To be continued (although possibly in the book)(when I manage to get a book deal and write it). In the meantime, I want – no, probably need is better – to see it again.