George Brant’s award winning play Grounded has been announced for a run of shows at the Royal Exchange Theatre from 4th November to 8th November as part of a national tour, following the success of sell out performances at the Edinburgh Festival and Gate Theatre as well as a series of dates at Studio Theatre in Washington DC. It is also set to return to the US for further runs.
The play which challenges assumptions and preconceptions of war, family and womanhood stars Lucy Ellinson as an F16 fighter pilot who falls pregnant, ending her career in the sky. Whilst her airborne days may be gone, she still hunts terrorists by day during 12-hour shifts controlling drones over the Middle East from the relative comfort of an air-conditioned trailer in Las Vegas, before returing home for the evening as a wife and mother. It’s a story which provokes thoughts of the far reaching and somewhat detached military technology in use, controlled from afar, and witnesses Lucy Ellinson’s fighter pilot slipping into a complexed mixed feeling of guilt and confusion.
Grounded is a Gate Theatre production (with the support of Arts Council England and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation) which is being presented by independent producer Beckie Darlington and directed by Christopher Gayden (Artistic Director of The Gate Theatre), who commented “This is one of the finest plays I have ever directed. It’s an extraordinary, caustic exploration of one of the most important issues of our time and it packs a multitude of ideas into a single, brilliantly compelling character. Since opening in Edinburgh last year, it has been hugely exciting to see how thousands of people have connected with it and so I am thrilled at the opportunity to take it on tour and allow it to reach an ever wider audience.”
Grounded is being performed at the Royal Exchange Theatre from 4th November until 8th November 2014. Tickets £12.
image credit University of Salford Press Office/flickr under creative commons licence
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