Grounded

by George Brant
Singapore Repertory Theatre
KC Arts Centre, Singapore

The Singapore Repertory Theatre kicks off its 2024 season with a series of three monologues. First up, we have Grounded by George Brant, a blistering war drama which premiered at the Edinburgh festival a decade ago and has enjoyed warm reviews since. Directed by Renee Yeong and performed by Oon Shu An, it centres around a female US fighter pilot who gets grounded after an unexpected pregnancy and is relegated from cruising the brilliant blue skies to the "chair force", operating a military drone remotely from a trailer in the desert. 

Brant's play is unique in depicting the realities of modern drone warfare and the toll it takes on soldiers. Does a drone pilot's safety and lack of proximity to the enemy make the war they wage any less real? In the case of our protagonist, she finds herself unable to reconcile her alpha female past life with her current situation, serving out twelve-hour shifts in a windowless room where she stares at a stark grey screen. 

She returns home every night to her husband and daughter but can't simply enjoy a normal domestic routine when the onscreen war is waiting to resume the very next day. Can she blithely kill a child thousands of miles away by pressing a button and still  hug her daughter goodbye? Struggling to keep her personal and professional lives apart, she's eventually driven to breaking point over the course of a mission, resulting in devastating consequences. 

Oon delivers a strong performance that ranges from chatty to intense to emotional but does not have the natural ability to command the stage for the entire ninety minutes of this demanding, talky monologue, resulting in things feeling overly protracted at times. Production designer Diego Pitarch keeps our focus squarely on the performer by having a streamlined set featuring just the pilot's seat, aided by Genevieve Peck's thrilling projections, Petrina Dawn Tan's lighting and Guo Ningru's sound. 

A powerful, thought-provoking play that explores the moral responsibility of a soldier and how the hardest war one wages is within oneself.

The Crystalwords score: 3/5