SPITFIRE SOLO

SPITFIRE SOLO

Nicholas Collett Productions in association with perf@ect

at the New Wolsey Theatre Ipswich

12.04.2012

for The Public Reviews

Donington and Duxford, Bentwaters and Martlesham, random reminiscences in the bar before this fascinating one-man show. The Spitfires that Peter flew were based on the south coast, of course, and later at "Biggin-on-the-Bump".

This is his story, the memories equally random as he sits in his Eastbourne retirement home: wings on his armchair, his walking stick his joystick, the breakfast table his battlefield, with bread-and-butter bombs and a sauce-bottle Spitfire.

Nicholas Collett's finest hour includes not only history, but one man's life, with its triumphs and its tragedies. An introduction from a Frank Capra film, his first ever flight ["Sentimental Journey" on the soundtrack], his morning routine as a boy on the base, and now, turned eighty, in Silver Birches. He talks to the kids at St Oswald's Primary, and to the grand-daughter he never saw growing up. A host of ghosts people his memories: Alice, WAAF girl and wife, Alan Hart the Aussie private investigator, a pipe-puffing CO straight out of central casting, a bluntly honest oncologist. He's perceptive about Goering's great mistakes, and graphically conveys the reality of what it was like in that freezing cold cockpit, how it felt to bale out of a stricken plane.

He has created, in this understated but deeply felt performance, a memorable character. By no means a stock type – son of Skipton, straight-talking and movingly frank about fighting and killing for freedom. As he says at the start, this was not really a battle, but an act of defiance, and without that act of defiance, "where would you be now ?".

Good to see youngsters in the audience amongst the Spitfire buffs and those old enough to remember the dark days of the 1940s. One of the most telling effects was when remembrance merged into a memorial roll call of the friends who died in the Battle of Britain, young men whose lives were lost in the fight for freedom.

Peter's life, far from perfect, a success in trade, a failure as a father, living alone for 27 years, must stand for all the rest. And we can't help willing him to succeed as he takes one last flight across the world to Adelaide, in search of Amelia, his runaway daughter.

This is a developing piece – it has not always been a solo flight, for example – and it might be good to see a little more documentary footage, hear a little more music. And to explore some of the other characters, like Dorota his Polish care assistant.

But however it shapes up later in its travels, it is bound to remain an important piece of social history, and a privileged window into one pilot's private life.

this piece first appeared on The Public Reviews