With the chairs of the audience being arranged into a semi-circle, my mind’s eye immediately conjured up images of an interrogation room, an arena, and a courtroom. Certainly, Rabbit’s Head (in particular, the incredibly talented directorial dynamic duo of Josh Myers and Josh BG) do everything in their power to put their characters on trial, as they confess to the audience their deepest secrets and overwhelming psychological anguish. From left to right: Ana (Roxana Lupu, out of focus in left foreground); Alex (Alex Forsyth); Clive (Clive Keene); Graham (Graham O’Mara, illuminated); Thalissa (Thalissa Teixeira); and Floss (Florence Roberts). Photo courtesy of David Monteith-Hodge. Sadly, the choice to stay downstairs for another drink was too tempting for some audience members, which was a great pity because act two is where the cleverness of Slade makes his a voice well worth listening to.

Powerful is just one of the many words that I could use to describe BU21. Six very individual stories connect around one event and the PTSD group they attend. As I’ve said above, these are all very different people and it’s really great how the writing makes them all not just believable as characters but as people affected by the disaster that befell the country. The main effect of the writing is to make the audience question how they would react to an event like this? Having been in the RAF based in London during the days when the IRA were at their most active I always assumed I would react with total professionalism to a terrorist outrage but really nobody knows how it will affect them and that is something the play really brings to life, particularly in the character of Graham who does everything wrong yet somehow does something right in his initial response. Stuart Slade shows how the tragedy becomes an opportunity for most of the six. Graham makes a great deal of money from a ghost-written book about himself. Alex’s promotion prospects improve as a result of the explosion killing a number of bankers. He also manages to use the therapy group to find a partner from an influential family. Clive gets into a relationship with the woman who watched his father die.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Mark Westbrook is the Course Leader of the One Year Diploma in Stage and Screen Acting at Acting Coach Scotland In a creative move dictated apparently by the writer, the actors use their own Christian names as character names. I’m not watching a moralistic drama documentary but an immersive piece of theatre with characters I care about played by a refreshing, young, energetic cast, sculptured by an equally energetic and talented new director, Matt Bond.

Filled with harrowing moments, dark laughter and charismatic performers, this is a bold directorial debut by Matt Bond. BU21 holds an unapologetic mirror to the face of today’s society. It highlights the terrifying acceptance of tragic events and humbles the viewer to the reality of the experiences of those involuntarily involved. It is a scarce reminder that the trauma continues long after the media has moved on to its next new shiny event. So you know how on the news these days there's just this endless stream of horrendous shit going down, like every single night? Suicide bombs, mass shootings, genocides, drone strikes, school massacres – it's like the end of the world or something... And you're kind of like – "Could I even cope if that stuff happened to me?"' When the body lands in Floss’s garden, the thought that runs through her head is a line from the song "It’s Raining Men". Alex tells us that he saw the survivors' group as a good place to pull vulnerable women. Graham, the fraudulent celebrity hero makes a racist speech to the group. Six people meet in a PTSD group, we witness their monologues, describing the tragedies they were part of and their lives afterwards. Sometimes they stop, unable to speak, as their memories become too vivid and they can’t express their emotions in words. Floss, a young girl who witnessed a man dying in her garden after he fell from the airplane, is now haunted by his face. As she finds out that “70% of the passengers were conscious while they were falling”, she establishes that it takes a whole 22 seconds for the airplane to fall to the ground. She counts in complete darkness as the director forces us to go through a psychological experiment and imagine what it’s like to know for 22 seconds that your death is imminent.

Support The Stage by registering or subscribing

The performance BU21 at Trafalgar Studios is set in the aftermath of a fictional tragedy: a jet was shot by a surface-to-air missile and crashed in Fulham, South-West London, leaving hundreds of people dead and thousands injured. Questions our assumptions about collective heroism’ … Clive Keene and Florence Roberts in BU21. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian Clive’s (Clive Keene) father, a cardiologist, was a passenger in Flight BU21, his body landing still seated on the garden of Floss (Florence Roberts), a student making a sandwich in her kitchen.

However fictional, this event reminds us of the tragedies that occur nowadays with frightening regularity – school massacres, suicide bombs, mass shootings… Pretty grim subject for a play performed at the theatre in the very heart of the West End, but the location – between the main tourist attractions (as well as terrorist targets): Big Ben and Trafalgar Square – makes the subject even more relevant. Amongst the trauma and suffering lurks an awful lot of humour… gallingly graphic, desperately bleak, heartrendingly sad and quite, quite hilarious' Exeunt Magazine As a company we want to be always levelling up, expanding and growing. We want to offer a platform for other emerging writers, for other Stuart Slades, to produce really powerful, fierce new writing and we hope we can do that going forward! This is both thought-provoking and funny, persevere to act two and you’ll go home theatrically fulfilled. Clive, who was bullied and called Osama Bin Laden at school after 9/11, became Muslim to rebel against his father. We learn that he wanted to go to Syria to help as he heard about children being gassed. The actor tells us with simplicity and ease how he was only stopped from going by his father and how useful it is to look muslim and start praying on a bus to scare away people eating smelly food… While frequently joking, Clive is the only character that goes through true transformation during the performance, others just narrate their emotional states. A small detail that he started growing beard again as his relationship with Floss broke down makes us wonder what is next for him.Graham (Graham O’Mara), a building firm driver who rushed to the scene, becomes a media celebrity after making an impassioned speech about the spirit of Londoners. He also falsely claims he saved a number of people. The first character comes on stage from the audience, as if demonstrating that she is one of us: a girl on crutches, called Izzy, her mum died in the crash. She tells us that when you watch such atrocities on tv, “you can’t conceive this happening to you, but then it does…” How would you cope? This becomes the main question of the performance.