The Stage

The Flying Machine

Published Wednesday 7 May 2008 at 14:00 by Susan Elkin

This pleasingly original piece for over sevens plays with ideas about the escapist power of ‘let’s pretend’ when you’re a kid in a situation you wish were different. It is also a gentle and witty reflection on the reality of illness and death.

Feisty, bossy but vulnerable Peeka (Beverley Denim) with her homely common-sensible Yorkshire accent, and frail, sightless, effetely-spoken Munib (Daniel Naddafy) are patients in a grubby, old-fashioned, green-tiled hospital ward. Under the strict rule of the complex, and often very funny, Nurse Cakebread (Maggie O’Brien) - who needs to be loved, cavorts about balletically when she thinks she’s alone, has been passed over for promotion and is ruthless and nasty - the children seem to be permanent, unvisited prisoners. Then the athletic, imaginative, rebellious Bonyek (Toyin Omari-Kinch) arrives for an eye operation and, suddenly all the boundaries are pushed - not least when the children try to escape in a wonderful Heath Robinson-esque flying machine built to a design left by Bonyek’s dead brother.

Although this episodic play is half an hour too long for its subject matter and the scene in which Naddafy doubles as the ghost of Bonyek’s brother doesn’t come off, this is a fine piece of theatre with some intensely sensitive writing.

The humour is good too - especially when Bonyek finally gives Nurse Cakebread her comeuppance, hilariously pedalling the treadmill which powers her sunbed. And what a stroke of topical comic genius to make Peeka’s handcraft project the building of a model city from the fluff and dust she finds under the beds.