Take Flight
Menier Chocolate Factory, SE1

It is hard to believe that, once upon a time, flying was seen as an act of heroic and solitary magnificence. A century later, you can’t get on a plane to Dublin without feeling somehow personally responsible for drowning the Maldives, not to mention Gloucestershire.

Richard Maltby and David Shire’s new musical resolutely ignores such concerns and determinedly celebrates the early days of flying as plain (or should that be “plane”?) heroic. Being American, they portray the conquest of the skies as pretty much a US achievement. No Percy Pilcher or Richard Pearse here. Instead, Take Flight tells the triple story, in fast-moving mini-scenes, of the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart.

The set, designed by David Farley, is resolutely minimal – a bare, sandy stage, brief appearances by two miniature aeroplanes and a packing case. The thrill of takeoff, the smell of aviation fuel, the wind in your hair, is communicated with just a step ladder and the sound of a single prop engine revving up. There are also lovely touches of filtered, low-angle lighting by David Howe, limpidly suggesting dusk, sunshine and cloud shadow.

The Wright brothers, bicycle-makers from Dayton, Ohio, spend their time tinkering around “in a bug-ridden sandpit in North Carolina”. Sam Kenyon is especially good as Wilbur Wright, with a facial expression of Buster Keaton-type blankness concealing an implacable drive to get up there first, before some “college-educated genius”. Michael Jibson is a boyish, round-faced Lindbergh, and Sally Ann Triplett is an engaging Earhart, a media celebrity even before she had achieved much beyond “A woman in an aeroplane! Fancy that!”.

Despite the fine performances, you could understand why some people might find Take Flight less than satisfying as an evening’s musical entertainment. It is not always richly comedic or bitingly witty. For example: “We’re the Wright brothers. How can we be wrong?” Though I did like the couplet: “They say we’re two dull, humourless blokes. Humourless? They just don’t get our jokes!” Of the one or two memorable songs, the Wrights’ The Funniest Thing, with Wilbur accompanying on extremely basic mandolin, is much the best. Most of the music is a kind of freeform jazz accompanying a freeform singing line – never exactly harmonising, and no doubt fiendishly difficult to do – yet what you really want in an essentially straightforward story such as this is correspondingly straightforward music that illuminates the words without vitiating their clarity.

Still, this partial failure is another indication of the piece’s kooky ambition and originality. As are the wads of technical data. Having people on stage sing ardently about coefficients of lift, lateral shift and longitudinal control is certainly a novelty. Any musical about the early days of aeronautical design must surely command puzzled admiration.

There are times, especially during the first half, when the piece seems to be uncertain where it is going or why it is trying to get there, like a passenger jet that has been hijacked by a group of radical deaf-and-dumb activists who have forgotten to bring along paper and a pencil.

The director, Sam Buntrock, keeps things together more tightly in the second half, which has better songs and more of an emotional pull, as the Wright brothers and Lindbergh finally achieve their dreams. Earhart, despite her growing involvement with George Putnam and their lush duet, “We’ll go halfway to heaven / Then we’ll never be earthbound again”, flies off into the blue yonder to achieve her own kind of immortality.

Other cast members work hard in a variety of roles. Clive Carter is good value as Otto Lilienthal, the original “Glider King”. A kind of malign chorus, he comments from beyond the grave on the puny attempts of these Americans to achieve what he died failing to do. Ian Conningham is an energetic mechanic, Ray Page, and funny as a bank manager unpersuaded about the prudence of investing in the Wright brothers. The lanky Christopher Colley possesses a striking stage presence that has you thinking: “That lad could go far.”

Take Flight’s greatest feat is to give you a vivid sense of what these giants may have been like: Lindbergh, solitary and dreamy; the Wrights, determined and chippy; Earhart, feisty and torn between home life and adventure.

Often entertaining, sometimes baffling, it is a typical laudable, bravura Menier oddity.

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