The potential problem of an hour and a half worth of monologue as a piece of entertainment is self-evident: it can be one-dimensional. It creates an insular atmosphere that demands a subtly attention-seeking protagonist, to coax the audience in and hold their interest single-handedly. Of course there’s the potential for plenty of performance elements to bring the story out of its shell – there’s the words themselves or, in Deafinitely Theatre there’s another character entirely. There are two actors, both communicating exactly the same story; one directly from page to stage, traditionally, and the other through British Sign Language. A language, that brings with it a dimension of movement an entirely heightened perspective that doubles the emotional integrity of Grounded.

Grounded, traditionally a one-woman show, written by George Brant, tells the story of a female fighter pilot (Nadia Nadarajah and Charmaine Wombwell) who gives up her career in her beloved sky when she falls pregnant, with the inherent responsibility, shifted perspective and desire to protect overriding the lifestyle she has known and loved. With that, the pilot’s world grows ever smaller and four-walled, underneath the unignorable mass of sky. She begins to work twelve-hour shifts in a campervan, in the middle of the beating heat of the Las Vegas Desert. She is a desk pilot, a drone operator. Monitoring grey screens and people closely enough to pull a trigger at her call. The HD, foreward-ready powers of control mean that the pilot can now see her victims closer than ever. She can see their faces, she can see their body parts as they disperse in explosion. Then she goes home, kisses her little girl goodnight, eats dinner and watches television with her husband. The monotony of the routine is a smidge heavy-handed: I think it’s fair to say that the trouble with describing monotony is that it’s monotonous. But it is exactly that monotony, and the dead weight of guilt that it magnifies, that facilitates the pilot to dishevel, inwardly, as her two lives become merged.

The performers balance each other. Wombwell is every inch the ‘fighter’ pilot,a bolshy, no shit, lad’s girl. Whereas Nadarajah brings the sensibility and the emotion to the role, with graceful and heartfelt signing, almost seeming to represent the internal whilst Wombwell takes the external. My focus shifted between the two, watching Nadarajah whilst listening to Wombell; or vice versa; or either or. Saying that, I found it difficult to empathise with the character herself. How her woes seem, simplistically, to amount to her ability to detach herself from grief so long as she’s killing from the sky, but killing from the ground, where she is safe, and where she has family who love her, is a problem.

Overall, I found Deafinitely’s production of Grounded utterly intriguing and perpetually imaginative and interesting, despite a few hiccups with sound cues (ironic?) and one of the performer’s following facial expression the mishap. I’ll look forward to their next project with bated breath.

Grounded is playing Park Theatre until 21 November. For more information and tickets, see the Park Theatre website. Photo by Marc Brenner.