Airsick

Synopsis

Check in for this turbulent black comedy about love, loneliness and how we shape our future. Lucy thinks she's finally cracked the love thing - Joe, her handsome American boyfriend is moving over to London. So how come he seems to be heading for the emergency exit? Lucy's best friend Scarlet is on an endless carousel of losers, users and married men. Her Dad just thinks we're all better off flying solo. But when mysterious Kiwi Gabriel arrives in their midst and starts showing an unhealthy interest in Lucy, it seems that everyone's baggage is finally coming out on display. What does it take to escape the past? And what can you do when people just make you sick? Age recommended 16+

Our Review:

14 October 2003

Airsick is, to borrow a phrase from football commentators, a play of two halves. Billed as a black comedy, its comedy is confined largely to its first half while its blackness is all bundled up in the second - which makes the whole of this stage debut from screenwriter Emma Frost, while intriguing, rather less than the sum of its uneven parts.

Set in post-911 London, Airsick centres around best friends Lucy and Scarlet and the men in their lives. Scarlet's men are mainly faceless. Lucy's are three-strong - her world-weary father Mick, her American ex-pat boyfriend Joe and her secretive admirer, a Kiwi globetrotter named Gabriel. These men and the women are, to varying degrees, all sexual predators and emotional pygmies, seemingly intent on proving Mick's maxim that we really are better off alone.

Frost proves a dab hand at dialogue, particularly in the more light-hearted first half, where in addition to some wry and flirtatious...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com (212.211.100.2) - 2 November 2003:

I agree with your reviewer on this one. It's a good production, well-acted and designed, but doesn't really go anywhere. In trying to be clever and attempt 'big themes', it suffers in both characterisation and structure. At the risk of being labelled old-fashioned - another play looking for a plot / story....

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