Spitfire Solo.
Written and performed by Nicholas Collett. Directed by Gavin Robertson. Lighting and sound in Adelaide by Stephen Dean. Produced by Nicholas Collett Productions. The Bakehouse Main Theatre. Adelaide Fringe February 24 – March 7 2020.
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
Eighty year old Peter Walker sits in his armchair
at the Nursing Home and remembers. He remembers those bloody wonderful years as
a spitfire pilot and the Battle of Britain. He remembers his wife Alice who
died of cancer many years before. And he remembers his daughter Amelia who left
home twenty seven years ago and has not been heard of since.
Nichols Collett’s Spitfire Solo premiered
in 2011 at the Eastbourne Festival with Collett in the role of Peter and two
actresses playing Dorota the Nursing Home carer and Amy, the granddaughter who
arrives unexpectedly to find her grandfather and reunite Peter with his
daughter and her husband. At the
Adelaide Fringe, Collett plays all the roles, seamlessly and engagingly under
Gavin Robertson’s carefully staged direction. Collett’s performance is assured
and he transitions effortlessly and with perfect versatile ease into the roles
of the young spitfire pilot, his carer, children at a local school where he
agrees to talk about his wartime experience, a burley private investigator, engaged
to find his daughter and granddaughter Amy.
Past and present merge in a wave of nostalgia
for a past when ordinary men were called on to perform extraordinary tasks.
Walker, though wounded, survived where many died. The futility of war and the
loss of so many fine young men lingers in the memory, that silent receptacle of
vanished experience. The result is a performance of exceptional engagement.
Collett has written a play about one pilot who played his part as he was called
on to do. It is the unassuming humanity of an ordinary human being that
captivates and instructs us in the nature of humility and bravery.
From the opening screening of the beginning of Battle
of Britain to the final moment of Peter’s descent into Adelaide to meet his
estranged daughter Spitfire Solo keeps us absorbed in Coillett’s simple
tale of one man’s life. The challenges of wartime action and life’s journey are
framed by character and survival. Peter Walker’s life is such an example of courage,
a simple man who lived, loved, suffered and survived. The play’s potency is in
the audience’s wrapt involvement.
Using film footage, songs and music from the wartime
era, Collett and Robertson build the atmosphere and then allow Collett’s
excellent and entertaining performance on the intimate Bakehouse Theatre stage
to keep an audience totally enthralled.
