By Peter Maddern
Guy Masterson’s international theatre productions return to Adelaide this month with five hour long one man shows at the Marryatville High School’s Forge Theatre. They were last here for the 2012 Fringe and they are always worth the effort. Spitfire Solo tells the tale of a pilot (Nicholas Collett) during the Battle for Britain in 1941 and his life since, including the painful separation from his daughter 20 years after the war ended.
Collett dashes about the sparsely decked out stage playing both the virile pilot as well as his latter self sixty years on. It is the tale of an ordinary man, faced with extraordinary call to duty who was part of a team that prevailed and, in his case, lived on to tell the tale. However, neither his heroics nor that ordinariness protected him from being just another guy trying out of his depth when raising his daughter, in another generation, alone after his wife dies of cancer.
As with much of GMT’s theatre, the greatest enjoyment of the work comes after you have left the auditorium, reflecting on those contradictions; where surviving being in the cross hairs of a Messerschmidt does not immune one from the intense pain of a broken family, of a daughter who rejects you absolutely and leaves to live 12,000 miles away.
Collett comprehensively delivers on the stoic, proud but broken soul of his pilot and the hope that emerges when the chance of fulfilment comes from an unlikely source. His stage artefacts are used to both great and surprising effect – a walking cane as a machine gun trigger, pieces of white bread as bombs on London and so on. Perhaps confining the stage area and thus the audience seating may have helped add additional intimacy and gravitas to the production but this fine theatre does not stand or fall on that observation.
More shows this coming Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday and see our other reviews from the current GMT season.
Kryztoff Rating 4K
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