This uplifting comedy brings you all the characters, romance and action of Tom Cruise’s aerial blockbuster
https://tickets.gildedballoon.co.uk/event/14:6745
Top Gunchained revisits an iconic blockbuster through the lens of parody and fandom — what interested you in exploring the emotional connection people have with films like Top Gun rather than simply spoofing them?
When I started retelling Top Gun (and previously Die Hard in Yippee Ki Yay) I instinctively wanted to tell another story alongside the film. As someone who loves these movies sufficiently to want to spend years retelling them, I’m drawn to a story of fans.
Art affects you differently as you age. The song you had your first kiss to as a teenager might bring nostalgia in your twenties and other emotions later at a friend’s wedding when you’ve just been through a break-up. In these plays, I follow changes related to films rather than songs. Top Gunchained shows how a shared love of Top Gun changes alongside a father-son relationship.
The show combines high-octane action with a father-and-son relationship story; how important was it for the emotional narrative to sit alongside the comedy and nostalgia?
For me, it’s vital. I want the audience to laugh their heads off but also be moved. I love that combination of laughter and emotion when I’m watching plays or movies or TV and I aspire to the same in my writing.
Top Gunchained tells the audience all of Top Gun alongside a more grounded family story. One of my biggest challenges as a writer is to balance the two. Most audience members come for the movie. So the show needs to be mostly movie with the parallel story told in as dextrous, light-footed way as I can. Not easy to do – with Yippee Ki Yay, I was rewriting my rewrites on the train to Edinburgh. Hopefully Top Gunchained won’t need finishing quite so close to the opening show!
Your previous collaboration on Yippee Ki Yay developed a strong cult following — how has that experience shaped the way you approached staging another beloved action film as a one-person performance?
That’s very kind of you. It’s certainly very helpful having worked together before.
Hal (director), Emma (movement and associate director), Benjy (lighting and stage manager) and I spent a long time working out what film could follow Die Hard. For me, it needed to be a movie I loved that also had something I could echo in the parallel story.
Top Gun also offered a further challenge – how the hell do you do dogfights on stage? With one actor? That seemed a fun challenge. There were times in workshop when it seemed too much of a fun challenge… but we’ve been able to apply our experience combining humour, drama, poetry, puppetry and movement and I’m really excited about the show we are making.
Richard’s work often blends poetry, storytelling and theatre — what does rhythmic language and spoken-word structure bring to recreating a cinematic world on stage?
The poetry is doing different jobs at different times. Some examples:
– acting as a designer
– characterisation via verse structure
– changing energy by changing rhythm
– time travel. Echoing language from earlier in the play, like a reprise in a musical
– for comic effect – a punchline hitting harder because it rhymes
– rhymes work (I think) because there is something very satisfying in presenting the similarity between two words (or phrases, or emotions, or ideas) while simultaneously drawing attention to their difference. So the poetry is hopefully doing that at various times throughout.
But our show is also very theatrical and at times we stop talking and use Benjy’s lighting and Ben Hudson’s sound and score to tell the story. Having that stylistic variation is vital.
With one performer recreating aerial dogfights, romance and blockbuster spectacle, how much of the humour comes from theatrical imagination rather than literal representation?
That’s part of it. Certainly part of the fun for the audience is they are complicit in the pretend of it all. There’s a very natural human joy in make believe that we mostly don’t get to indulge after childhood. It’s a lot of fun being part of that in a room full of other adults.
But I’m mostly not trying to remind the audience that it is theatre – I’m mostly trying to make the theatrical telling seem real. I want you to care about the dogfights because Mav and Goose’s lives are in danger.
As longtime collaborators, how do you balance precision and chaos in rehearsal when creating shows that feel both tightly crafted and joyfully spontaneous for audiences?
Not sure we do balance – it feels like mostly chaos in the early stages, gradually coming under control as we work on it.
I’m glad if the shows feel tightly crafted – a huge amount of thought and workshopping and rehearsal and rewriting and heart and love go into making them. Then there’s an element of freedom that comes from being a solo performer – there’s no danger I could throw other actors off if I interact with the audience.
Some audiences are very chatty, some less so. If you don’t want to interact, no problem, but if you do, let’s go. I really enjoy that liveness of live theatre. I guess it’s making the writing and tech and movement tight enough there is room to be spontaneous.