Still mixing film and live performance, Big State takes us into the cinema with its latest offering. A tiny screen shows film trailers followed by the main feature, Fallen Angels, a tale of a modern desert war field hospital. The characters climb out of the cinema screen onto the stage and when their hospital is bombed the surgeons are tossed into a parallel reality where they exist in a sort of crazy film loop. What follows is an intriguing journey as the main character tries to discover who he is and why he’s in this particular film. ‘He has no back story’, one character says, and we realise that this is a tale about the interplay of fantasy and reality.
Our hero is thwarted in bouts of hilarious wordplay with the other characters, who can only respond as the two dimensional beings that they are. Towards the end, he is catapulted into scenes from the aforementioned film trailers: it’s certainly an amusing denouement, but I did feel that the writer was possibly hurrying to a conclusion.
Overall, Fallen Angels is a brave attempt to investigate big abstract themes and John Nicholson of Peepolykus writes a fascinatingly dense plot. Once again the talented actors of Big State have come up with a unique and daring piece.