Flight Memory

How extraordinarily poignant is the black box? Unable to save the people it records, it holds the last moments of people’s lives in the hope of preventing future deaths. For families of crash victims, it provides the most meagre of solaces: the answer to the question “why”. Based on a biography of David Warren, the Australian inventor of the black box, Alana Valentine’s latest project Flight Memory is a tale of sadness, persistence, guts, loss and triumph, underpinned by that poignancy. The Street’s production presents the material as a song cycle, a kind of bare-bones musical. The lines and structure of the set (designed by Imogen Keen) are deceptively simple, evoking both engineering drawings and the lights down the centre of a plane. Carolyn Stacey’s direction gives the blocking a vibrancy, painting scenes with the movement.

Sandra France’s modern jazz score is Bruce Rowland film music meets Dave Brubeck, with hints of smoky bar jazz, Andrews Sisters and 60s scat. With complex rhythms and rapidly changing tempos, it’s clever without ever becoming too discordant or inaccessible. The three performers are excellent. There are two rich, top notch jazz vocalists in Michelle Nicolle and Leisa Keen, which contrast with the mellow, textured sound of Liam Budge, who voices protagonist David Warren.

The song Crystal Set beautifully evokes the eerie, nostalgic crackles and whines of tuning an early radio. Like many of the songs, it’s suffused with sadness: in this case, the radio in question was a gift to Warren by his father soon before his father died in plane crash into the Tasman Sea. Fatal Fog and Voices of the Dead are deeply sad, full of ghostly echoes. There’s a strange rhythm and repetition to the words, a kind of choppy awkwardness that might have come with embodying the engineer Warren’s voice, which perhaps some will find off-putting. These contrast with the humour of The Family Jewels and the joyful 60s jazz of Red Tap Reg.

The show opens with a non-specific threat to theatrical critics (noted), so I will take my life into my hands and mention that I felt the number Corner of Hell did not work. The song combines aspects of spoken word poetry and preaching (a very clever reference to Warren’s preacher father), but it comes across as almost rap, and unfortunately almost rap is inevitably bad rap. Perhaps what would rescue it would be to make it much more recognisable as beat poetry and emphasise the preaching – even there, Liam Budge is working against his own laid-back style which was undercutting the power of the piece.

That niggle aside, Flight Memory is a challenging and moving work.

Cathy Bannister

Photographer: Peter Hislop