Review: DREAMLINER at White Bear Theatre 27 - 30 April 2022

‘some problems due to inexperience, and an awful lot of good things’ ★★.5

Dominic Coneely Hughes has written an ambitious sequence of five monologues with some interpolated framing narrative, performed by seven student actors, directed by a student director, Adwitha Arumugam. It has the faults and virtues of the studenty aspects in large measure – hesitations, over-writing, a terrible inclination to troop on and off the stage with items of furniture, together with bright-eyed enthusiasm and commitment, and an abundance of energy. So, some problems due to inexperience, and an awful lot of good things.

The play deals with the aftermath of a flight that mysteriously returned to the ground after a journey of a few minutes and produced a whole slew of interpretations from the passengers. A pair of airline incident investigators work hard to make sense of the conflicting accounts, and we listen to five passengers describing their experiences and the two investigators bickering over the value of those accounts. I had some sympathy with the attitude of the senior investigator – nothing happened, no-one died, move on – but the play demands that the passengers’ stories are attended to.

Perhaps the biggest problem is the airliner framing device. It shapes up as an episode of The Twilight Zone, but never delivers a twist or a particularly good reason for the setting. The monologues, which grew from improvisations over Zoom during the years of the Covid, are compelling to varying degrees, but being crammed into a port-manteau structure that barely makes sense does them no favours. Maybe a druggy party with a bunch of come-down reflections would work better. It would certainly demand less coherent summing-up, and that would be helpful.

The company have a lot of ambition, a plan to take the show to Edinburgh, and energy to burn. The Encompass Festival is a great stepping-stone and Dominic Coneely Hughes is taking full advantage of it.

DREAMLINER

Written by Dominic Conneely Hughes

Directed by Adwitha Arumugam

Devised by The Company: Khye Bailey, Jo Gushurst, Danielle Antonietta, Crystal Sek, Tara Choudhary, Sam Law, Chelsea Bondzanga

Produced by Encompass

@EncompassOnline

Reviewer

Chris Lilly read Drama at Hull University in the 70s, stage-managed a bit, spent 8 years as a community arts worker in Tower Hamlets, did the occasional tech job, then taught in East London and participated in shedloads of community theatre. Since retiring from teaching, he has acquired an MA in 'Theatre' from the University of Surrey and indulged a passion for live performance anywhere in London courtesy of his

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