REVIEW: Brace Brace - PIP Theatre

Brace Brace

Presented by: PIP Theatre

Written by: Oli Forsyth

Directed by: Deidre Grace

Sound Design: Freddy Komp

Set Design: Bill Haycock

Lighting Design: Geoff Squires

Fight Director: Jason McKell

Intimacy Director: Heidi Gledhill

Photographer: Kris Anderson

“You would think a hijacking would kill the romantic mood.”

Ray and Sylvia’s story began like so many love stories do: eyes meeting across a crowded room. Romance followed. Then marriage. Then a honeymoon flight, with a whole future waiting for them on the other side of landing. But they never get the honeymoon they imagined.

Brace Brace, written by Oli Forsyth and produced by PIP Theatre, is the kind of play that grips you by the shoulders and pulls you into a visceral journey. It is oddly funny, properly frightening, and painfully human. Told through Ray and Sylvia’s own voices, the production seats the audience close around the action on three sides. It does not let us sit back as distant witnesses. Instead, it pulls us into the fractured memory of the event. We are there with them, trapped in the noise, confusion, and terror of the plane cabin. In a single moment, a wild-eyed male passenger storms towards the cockpit and suddenly, the plane is plummeting towards the ocean. Sylvia, unbelted and thrown towards the front of the aircraft, makes a choice to act. Or perhaps her body makes the choice before her mind has time to catch up. In doing the unthinkable, she saves everyone on board.

We are often captivated by disaster stories because they make us wonder, “What would I do in that moment of crisis? Would I fight, flee, freeze, help, hide?” But Brace Brace is not really about the flight. Not entirely... It is more interested in what happens afterwards, when survival comes with moral, psychological, relational, and physical consequences: the “why me?” moments, the survivor’s guilt, the anger, and the fragile coexistence of relief and grief. It is about what it takes to keep living after catastrophe, while parts of yourself remain forever altered and your nervous system is still somewhere in the sky, bracing for impact.

Amelia Slatter and Henry Solomon are seated in theatre before the story begins, eyes fixed on the floor, waiting in lounge chairs like passengers called to a gate that no one wants to pass through. Brace Brace is primarily a narrated two-hander, and the dynamic between Henry and Amelia is truly compelling. Playing Ray and Sylvia, they swiftly and convincingly build a bond, then spend the rest of the play showing us how two survivors of the same event can process it so differently.

Amelia Slatter is the blazing centre of this production. She is portrayed as tough, reactive, vulnerable, furious, and detached all at once. She moves between love, anger, and numbness like a pendulum of trauma, never at rest. Amelia’s performance feels deeply informed, whether through research, lived understanding, or extraordinary empathy for survivors. Sylvia’s PTSD is not portrayed through obvious symptoms, but through the paranoia infiltrating her home, depersonalisation, an insistent need for understanding, and the simultaneous presence of relief and grief. It is in her terror of being misunderstood and her desperation for someone to affirm her reality; someone to say, “Yes, this really happened. It was as bad as you say. You did the right thing.”

Henry Solomon is funny, comforting, and quick-witted, delivering many of the play’s best one-liners. His dry, irreverent delivery injects much-needed life between the play’s more harrowing moments. But he is more than just comic relief; his portrayal is painfully human, even when frustrating to witness. He tries to remain himself, or at least convince himself that he can. His instinct is to move forward, to rationalise, to keep the relationship from being defined by the worst thing that has happened to them. Sometimes his stance suggests strength; other times, avoidance. Sylvia and Ray’s coping paths diverge so strongly that their shared experience becomes another kind of isolation. The more Ray wants to move away from the event, the more Sylvia is pulled back into its relentless grip. There is a brutal frustration in watching trauma alter a person’s fundamental sense of self while everyone around them waits for them to become “normal” again.

Then there is Matthew Filkins, who gives a genuinely chilling performance as The Man. During the hijacking sequence, he is terrifying without needing to say a word. His physical presence, facial expression, and unstable intensity create an air of dread. The psychotic look he gives teeters somewhere between fractured reality and chilling intention. It is the sort of face that would haunt nightmares. Despite knowing he is a sweetie in real life, Matt’s unsettling portrayal sent chills through me more than once. Matthew is also astonishingly quick in his character shifts. As a television interviewer, he snaps into a completely different mode, with that bright, polished, hungry media personality down to a fine art. Each character portrayal feels so distinct that, in a blink, he can become a grateful father, the pilot, the shrewd interviewer, or the man at the centre of the nightmare.

The production’s first clever design detail appears before the play even begins: the program resembles an aircraft safety card. Inside, Bill Haycock’s minimalist set transforms the stage into a runway-like aisle, evoking a plane without literal interior props. No clutter, no hiding spaces, just bodies, words, sound, light, and my rising blood pressure! Freddy Komp’s immersive sound design feels visceral, with aircraft effects that seem physical rather than decorative. There are moments where I felt my body preparing for impact while my brain knew perfectly well I was sitting safely in a theatre. It reminded me of Darkfield’s Flight from 2024. Geoff Squires’ lighting design is colourful, controlled, and uneasy. Much of the audience remains in darkness while the action moves up and down the raised, narrow stage. The LED strips, like emergency exit lighting, are tied to the breath of the play, tightening and releasing with the same awful rhythm as panic.

The physical sequences are some of the most impressive parts of the production. With Jason McKell as Fight Director and Heidi Gledhill as Intimacy Director, the attacks feel frighteningly real. Amelia and Henry narrate moments as they play them, which could easily create distance, but here it has the opposite effect. We hear what is happening while seeing bodies commit to it, so it becomes both memory and immediate action at once.

Writer Oli Forsyth populates the play with brilliant one-liners, ethical knots, and emotional landmines, all perfectly placed and paced. It grapples with fear, power, identity, blame, justice, and the messy aftermath of doing what is “right.” As Sylvia exclaims in exasperation, “I had no idea helping stop a plane crash would have such moral consequences!” A key strength of the script is its tonal whiplash, jolting from humour to violence, tenderness to discomfort, and absurdity to deep sadness.

Director Deidre Grace keeps those shifts moving with thrilling precision. There is not a wasted moment. The 80 minutes fly by (bad wording sorry!). The pace is relentless but not rushed, full of words, emotions, and action, yet still spacious enough for silence, tension, and dread. “Stop letting him define you!” may be a rallying cry, but this production makes painfully clear how impossible that can feel when trauma rewires your sense of safety. Together, the writing and direction understand that the real question is not simply, “What happened on the plane?” It is about “the person you choose to be after the worst happens.”

Though I am fortunate never to have endured such trauma myself, members of my family have. This play makes me reflect much more deeply on how a single event that may last just minutes can cast long, haunting shadows; stretching on in ways no headline or court case can contain. I kept thinking of words shared by a family member during the Port Arthur 30th anniversary just last month: “Even in the face of profound darkness, there can still be a will to protect life. When people speak about survival, they often imagine strength as something immediate and visible. But for many of us, survival is quieter than that. It was learning how to gain confidence in a world that suddenly felt unsafe. It was carrying the grief, confusion, guilt, and questions that we may never have answers to. The scars people carry are real. They do not simply disappear with time. Even when the world moves on, and when headlines fade, and the attention shifts elsewhere, for those of us touched by that day, it is never forgotten. It lives within us.”

That sense of surviving beyond the moment itself is what Brace Brace captures so well. This production is a rollercoaster in the truest sense (sending a similar rush of adrenaline through me actually!). It is strangely funny, confronting, and violent, but ultimately, it is about connection; the people we cling to, the ones we lose, and the ones, if any, who truly understand our pain. This is a meticulously directed, beautifully performed, and technically striking piece that leaves the audience charged with tension. I would see it again in a heartbeat. I might also, perhaps, like never to board a plane again, though that is a separate matter entirely.