Airport (1996)

"Summer. Mountains and a cold blue lake. Grass and a tree for shade. A small boat. My father in a boat in the middle of the lake."

Suspect Culture's 1996 show Airport built on the success of the previous year's One Way Street, and was the result of a co-commission by the Tramway Glasgow, the Traverse Edinburgh, the British Council and the Cuarta Pared Theatre in Madrid. It was workshopped in Madrid and the eventual production had Spanish and Scottish cast members and scenes in English and Castillian.

The story focuses on a group of characters passing through - or, more often, permanently resident in - an airport. We meet Gordon, a man pathologically unable to catch his flight, several pilots sharing their knowledge of hijack situations, an advertising executive searching for the perfect image of travel, a woman who has never told anyone else her real name, and many more. In the first of these pictures, you can see the inept Gordon trying to prove that he is Scottish to the check-in staff by demonstrating a highland fling.

The show was important for Suspect Culture for a number of reasons:

• It was the first to demonstrate the company's international perspective in form as well as content.
• The director, Graham Eatough, made extensive use of gestures, which would come to be a signature motif of their work. Gestural movement had been first seriously developed in One Way Street but here it becomes a physical score that runs alongside the verbal text. These gestures were important in bringing together the different nationalities among the cast and characters. They also suggested various kinds of thematic concerns that Suspect Culture will continue to probe in the course of their next few shows: failed contact, the desire for honesty, the dynamics of greeting and parting, the ambiguities of love and aggression.
• It is the first of their shows that is unambiguously contemporary, and marks the beginning of an informal trilogy, set in modern culture's anonymous transit spaces, completed by the trendy bar of Timeless, and the interview room and hotel spaces of Mainstream. I have written about the significance of Suspect Culture's use of these spaces, and to prompt further thinking on this you might find useful Marc Augé's book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Translated by John Howe, London: Verso, 1995.
• It was a very successful show, touring internationally, and confirming their artistic importance. This attention would culminate two years later in their being awarded revenue funding by the Scottish Arts Council.

The show ran for about 95 minutes and was revived and revised for a Spanish tour in October 1996. It featured a cast of six. The original set, by Ian Scott, as you can make out from the second of these pictures, featured a rear screen often displaying a mock-universal image of idyllic holidayness. On the right and left of the playing area were two long conveyor belts, designed to resemble those on which your baggage is brought out after a flight. The cast occasionally were conveyed along these in certain sequences (see the second picture).

Nick Powell's music playfully used elements of muzak (of the kind one might hear in an airport lounge), mixed with curious circular structure, at times reminiscent of Michael Nyman's Peter Greenaway film scores. David Greig's text interwove the various stories and maintained a good tension between the lyricism and poetic imagery of the characters and the broad comedy of their encounters.

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