It is tricky trying to predict who the next Complicite or Improbable will be, but Passe Partout is certainly a company with the wind in its sails, and with judgment, plenty of dedicated hard work and a little luck they could really fly. This is a lovely, slightly dotty little devised show, and you should go, so you can say that you were there at the beginning before they really took off.
In fact flying is its subject. Part lecture and part flight of fancy, it is a wry mediation on the human desire to cease being earthbound, the absurdity of our dreams and the good and bad we do by insisting on trying and trying again.
It is also about flight - as in leaving the ground, and as in running away -from the things that really scare us such as relationships, marriages, real intimacy. The would-be inventor's wife removes herself by dying of consumption and flying up to the moon with an ease that her obsessed aviator husband would die for; Jo simply flies the coop one day, vanishing out of her partner Patrick's life while he is away on a business trip.
These stories are like little journeys within the bigger narrative or map, entwining together across minds and centuries so you are no longer certain of the difference between fact and fantasy. Like its subject matter, this is a show full of possibilities, and director Paul King (also responsible for Perrier award-winning Garth Marenghi's Netherhead) keeps things sweet and simple with only a little help from a bunk bed, a few twinkling lights, a clutch of balloons, a toy aeroplane and an immensely versatile cast who can all hold an almost bare stage with just their presence.
The piece has a charmingly eccentric bent that is kept in check by the heart that beats quietly but fiercely just below its surface. Like the solo pilot who found himself flying alone into the dark, silent night and remarked that he could "almost hear myself live", so Progress in Flying Machines reminds us why we all need to fly.
Until December 9. Box office: 020-7223 2223.
