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Up

 
Paul Fisher Cockburn Review by Paul Fisher Cockburn 4 Published: 3 Aug 2025 Gilded Balloon at Appleton Tower Show Dates: 30 Jul 2025-24 Aug 2025

At its heart, Up is a story about how opposites attract. But it also touches on ideas around luck and fate – about choices and coincidences – in ways that are genuinely engaging, thought-provoking and, for lack of a better word, playful.

There’s a lightness to proceedings, thanks to the way the story is told

The story focuses on what happens when Jamie – who believes she’s been extremely unlucky all her life – finds herself sitting next to “born lucky” Jay on a flight to Brazil—which, true to form, runs into extreme difficulties. Much of the narrative thrust for this show comes from the rhythmic returns to where our two-member cast – co-creator (with artistic director Douglas Irvine) Zoë Hunter and Michael Dylan – re-enact emergency masks dropping from above their heads, engines stuttering in flames, and hand baggage crashing to the floor. For, as they explained in an early “lesson” on the science behind powered flight, if something does go seriously wrong with an airplane, “gravity wins”.

Depressing? Not a bit of it: there’s a lightness to proceedings, thanks to the way the story is told. Wilson and Dylan use numerous toy planes and cars, action figures (of various sizes) and small suitcases filled with knickknacks to illustrate and progress the narrative – what the publicity refers to as “a fantasy table-top exploration using object theatre” but arguably best resembles children playing with whatever objects come to hand. Nor does the set resemble a passenger aircraft; rather it feels like the small corner of one of those vast warehouses where the retrieved items from crashes are stored. Wilson and Dylan are surrounded by metal shelves filled with cardboard boxes, and a whiteboard; they spend much of their time behind a small collection of office desks, facing out to the audience.

Its sense of “play” – in the childhood sense of the word – paradoxically may distance us from much of the reality of the situations we’re shown, but nevertheless helps us connect with the core emotional aspects of each character’s back story – in particular their past loves and traumas. It’s concise writing, combined with two energetic performances, which ensures we believe how and why these two people have met at the right – or possibly the absolutely wrong – time, and how arguably it doesn’t matter which.

Notwithstanding the asides name-checking the ancient Greek concept of the “Unity of Opposites” or more recent investigations into people’s ideas of good and bad luck undertaken by Professor Richard Wiseman, this is a dynamic, entertaining and remarkably uplifting production.

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The Blurb:

The odds of perishing in a commercial plane accident are 29.4 million to one. Reassuring. Except if you're the one. As emergency masks plummet, engines squeal and hand baggage flies from the overhead bins, two strangers hold hands. Scared and breathless, their lives flash past as they face their final moments together. Exploring themes of luck, choice, fate, coincidence and connection, this thrilling production, created by award-winning, critically acclaimed theatre company Visible Fictions, is a fantasy table-top exploration using object theatre and gripping storytelling.