There’s a whole other world out there of small, natty, funny little touring shows playing arts centres and village halls round the country. It seems doubly appropriate, therefore, that the resourceful East Midlands touring company, New Perspectives, should launch a new flight model about the great pioneering double act of Alcock and Brown.
The title conjures the 1966 British movie of magnificoes and their flying machines, and that’s fair enough, but comedy writers Brian Mitchell and Joseph Nixon refer more directly to a rich mock patriotic seam of theatre shows about Bulldog Drummond, Biggles and the Dambusters.
This is a world away from the melancholic meditations in Saint-Exupery’s great story Vol de nuit or the beautiful Charles Lindbergh opera by Brecht and Kurt Weill that landed at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago.
Here we have more paradoxically earthbound knockabout character comedy with engaging performances by C P Hallam as dashing, tall and bony former World War One pilot Captain John Alcock and Richard Earl as his navigational brain box, sidekick and slightly incapacitated partner Arthur Whitten Brown.
The pair made the first non-stop, sixteen-hour transatlantic flight from St John’s in Newfoundland to Clifden in Galway in June 1919; the adventure is presented in Daniel Buckroyd’s production as a ripping yarn with dodgy moments, mini-crises, creeping fog, jokes and a proper sense of triumph against all the odds.
Wittily sponsored by East Midlands Airport, the show restores the idea of the original adventure of flying but also its absurdity and dangers, which is perhaps not what an airline wants to underline these days.
The heroes’ Vickers-Vimy-Rolls bomber biplane, designed by Helen Fownes-Davies, is a splendid concoction of canvas and balsa wood, with a cockpit you’d only ever occupy at your own peril, but it brings back an entire period while doubling as a scenic breakwater.
And, as a bonus, the “read all about it” newspaper-style programme contains a cigarette card hall of aviation fame, charting the magic and mystery of everyone from Louis Bleriot, Amy Johnson and the Wright Brothers to Steve Fossett, Richard Branson and the Greek bloke who started Easyjet. Fly me to the moon… next stop, a parish hall in Notts.
Reviewed at the Corn Exchange, Newbury
