REVIEW - Manchester Evening News - 10th October 1995

The way Linda Anderson deftly mixes the themes of race, gender, and self-worth is both the success and undoing of this probing drama.

On the surface, The Flight Response tells the story of a mixed race couple - Sara and Lucas - with a baby, not much money, and with such an easy knack of getting up each others noses, it beats me what they ever saw in each other in the first place.

But there is more. Enter Karen, who has eyes only for...you've guessed it, Sara.

What Starts off as a curious insight into a racially mixed relationship quickly becomes strangely dislocated, and turns into a confusing and wholly pretentious menage a trois with all three characters loaded down with all sorts of emotional baggage.

Director Martin Reeve describes this as an adventure into untrodden territory - I disagree. The idea of plying us with a study of the black/white/gender question may be a good one but it is not new, and here it degenerates into mind-numbing psycho-babble.

Lucas (he never spoke to his father who beat him) is angry and paranoid. He used to work in a burger bar but is now doing a fine arts degree. Sara, at 34, is ten years older than Lucas, and was orphaned as a child.

When Andy Burke (a slightly wooden Lucas) barks at Pauline Shanahan (a spirited and believable Sara) that he doesn't need to be cossetted "safe in your white girl custody" after a run-in with the police, it sounds like another cliche to cross off Anderson's list and I start eyeing the exit.

The regular scene changes are also ponderous and don't help to keep your attention on the play's key issues. Perhaps no bad thing in a pub.
Until November 4.

REVIEW - City Life - October 1995

Two backpackers, the white Sara and her black boyfriend, Lucas, discover the grave of a slave, and the stage is set for what might be an interesting exploration of the legacy of past oppressions on the modern inter-race marriage. Linda Anderson's first play, The Flight Response, is Rocket theatre Company's second venture into pub theatre (The Square Albert, to 4 November). As major booze-mongers, its backers, Tetley, must be aware that the pub milleu needs something that little bit more dynamic to buttonhole the supping punter, and the subject of Anderson's play initially seems as though this might be just the thing. However, when it transpires that Sara is part of a writer's workshop, alarm bells begin to ring. By the umpteenth silly reference to slavery from the irritatingly petulant Lucas ("Breastfeeding!? That's slavery!!"), the alarms were rattling themselves off the wall. Gay issues - pusillanimously resolved - raise their head when Sara falls in love with her workshop leader, Karen. Actually, I only knew they'd fallen in love because we were told so. It certainly wasn't suggested by the passionless, hands-off relationship. And I only heard it because it was one of the few lines which was directed away from the actors' feet or which wasn't lost in the upholstery of the sofa where most of the play takes place, hidden behind less than ideal sightlines. This is thin stuff indeed, and while Anderson's attempts to transcend the mundanity with purple flights of prose suggest at least a potential for better things, it seems unfair to expose her first efforts in such a public way, certainly at over a fiver a ticket. Harsh words, perhaps, which this brave enterprise certainly doesn't need in it's early stages. but equally, if they indulge in the illusion of a job well done here, they'll go to the wall much faster than I can send them.