As we arrive, so do the actors. On stage, passengers gradually take their seats for a flight. Their actions are not dissimilar to ours as they fiddle on phones or glance around. But you’d be advised to buckle up, too, for Eve Leigh’s turbulent hijacking drama, which nosedives into collective responsibility for the climate emergency.
A steady flow of theatregoers becoming one audience and a gaggle of characters assembling a cast: Leigh is interested in how individual lives are subsumed into group behaviour and how the actions of one country can affect another. This is a playwright, too, who is refreshingly interested in bodies as well as words and Laura Keefe’s highly physical production, with movement direction by Carl Harrison, uses a choreography of collectivity. The flight attendant’s safety demonstration builds into a larky chorus line, there is a flash mob of headbanging to Rage Against the Machine and terror grips the passengers, so that they contort as one panicked mass.
Zoë Hurwitz’s set – one of those designs which keeps giving throughout the play – has a thrust, runway-like stage and gives the outline of the plane in strip lights, with actors spinning around on airline seats. The passenger list includes a couple on a bizarre first date, played by Phoebe Naughton and Mark Weinman, neatly evoking how jetting off lets us adopt slightly different identities. (There is also a subtle exploration throughout of different types of masks.)
Leigh conveys the sheer weirdness of plane travel: the anonymous states epitomised by muzak and, mostly, how nodding off and bracing for catastrophe go cheek-by-jowl. That powerfully leads to the notion that, in terms of the climate crisis, we are fiddling while Rome burns – or, as the play has it, while Puglia is destroyed by wildfire.
A series of mini-presentations, performed to lounge music, give potted histories on the central issues to varying effect and Benjamin Grant’s sound and Amy Mae’s lighting design combine well for moments of both comedy and horror. The cast – completed by Raj Bajaj, Siubhan Harrison, Robyn Sinclair and Zoë West – are uniformly excellent and Leigh’s hour-long drama is full of arresting observations and has a distilled power, even if one or twice it is diluted by the quirky humour.
Humanity is on a “highway to climate hell”, as the UN secretary general warned last year, and Wildfire Road hurtles us in that direction with a finely judged swerve towards hope.
At the Playhouse, Sheffield, until 18 March
