Flight Paths — National Theatre of Parramatta

A new cross-continental play that focuses on two young women taking radically different steps to make a global impact.
Matt Abotomey
March 22, 2018

Overview

With a global population of more than 7.5 billion, it's difficult to know whether individual ambitions to change the world are hopelessly utopian, unwittingly dictatorial, youthfully naïve or a responsibility shirked by the daunted and cynical. Flight Paths, a new play by Julian Larnach, focuses on two young women taking radically different steps to make their presence felt on a global scale.

Luisa (Ebony Vagulans) and Emily (Airlie Dodds) are both leaving Australia with their eyes on big change. Luisa's headed for Oxford University, Emily for Kenya to do aid work for an NGO. On opposite sides of the world, they discover that what they thought were clear-cut goals are blurred by factors they couldn't have accounted for.

Then a man falls out of the sky. From here, fate starts reeling Emily and Luisa in, entangling them, the stranger and their ambitions.

Larnach says that his goal for the work was to "put worlds onstage that I hadn't been seeing, populating them with young characters I hadn't been hearing, in order to prompt discussions about the world we haven't been having".

Three separate continents is an awful lot of the world to fit on one stage at Riverside, but if you harbour any hope of revolutionising the planet, imagining them all shouldn't be a stretch.

Image: Robert Catto. 

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