Wings Press Night - 20th September 2017
All NhT members, along with the cast and creative team of current community show Sing Before You Speak Again (see posts below and above), were invited to attend tonight’s Press Night of Wings in the Main House. It was, as always, great to see familiar faces outside the theatre before the show, excited about the performance, and see groups of members clustered together afterwards, discussing the impact of this important piece.
The play, written by Arthur Kopit in the 1970s, centres around Emily, a stunt pilot and wing-walker who suffers a stroke. Rather than telling her story narratively, the play plunges us into Emily’s interior world from the outset, allowing us glimpses of the disorientation and distress of the experience of stroke.
This production at the Young Vic stars Juliet Stevenson as Emily. Dressed entirely in white and silver, and suspended by wires so that she flies above the audience for much of the show, Emily seems like a lost astronaut or angel, and magical acrobat, all at once. This makes the piece both poetic and pragmatic, inviting us into an experience rather than making us purely spectators, but also granting us some insight into the reality of the situation.
What feels refreshing and honest about this production, in the context of community theatre, is the attempt to make a very specific experience universal - to demonstrate how physical illness can impact the individual emotionally and psychologically. This, in turn, has a direct link with the community show being made in response to Wings - the song cycle Sing Before You Speak Again, which has been written and composed through workshops with people who have had a stroke, or who have Dementia, Parkinson’s Disease and Aphasia. No doubt the cast and creative team of Sing Before You Speak Again will be reflecting on the significance of the stories they are singing in the light of the experience conveyed by Juliet Stevenson in Wings.