Wings, Young Vic, London, review: A remarkable performance by Juliet Stevenson

The last time Juliet Stevenson appeared at the Young Vic she was stuck up to her neck in earth in Beckett’s Happy Days. Now she’s aerially suspended in a void in this rare revival of Arthur Kopit’s play, first staged in America in 1978. The production reunites the actress with her Beckett director, Natalie Abrahami. It’s another superb achievement by this pair.

Wings takes us into the fractured and frightening world of the stroke victim. Stevenson portrays Emily Stilson, once an aviator and daredevil wing-walker. Now into late middle age, the character is sitting in an armchair quietly reading a book as we enter the theatre. Then the moment of seizure – a sudden blaze of light; a bewilderment of images projected onto the translucent curtains that swish along the traverse stage.

Cruelly imprisoned by aphasia, she remains a woman of spirit and courage and is impatiently nonplussed as to why the doctors can’t understand her answers to their trying questions. She reckons that she must have crashed behind enemy lines and been captured by people who want puzzlingly basic information from her, such as “how many nickels in a rhyme (sic)”. She can hear herself speaking quite intelligibly; they hear garbled speech (and sometimes vice versa).

Thanks to Stevenson’s remarkable performance, Emily comes across as frightened, funny, brave, and heart-wringing – often simultaneously. Asked to demonstrate what a toothbrush is for, she concentrates for a few moments and then puts it to her lips in a poignant little show of sang froid that she’s clearly not feeling. She spends a great deal of the 70 minutes hoisted aloft in her harness – tumbling, twisting and turning in empty space. The flying effects are by Freedom Flying and are beautifully integrated.

Abrahami’s sensitive and daring production makes these an eloquent physical metaphor for what is going on in the mind of Emily, a woman forcibly dislocated from the normal world. In a feat that may arouse a little envy in Neverland, Stevenson by turns soars, spins, thrashes and hangs like a discarded rag doll. The traverse stage in Michael Levine’s starkly effective design is a raised platform that slides treacherously back and forth. Drawn out by an insightful therapist (luminously played by Lorna Brown), who persuades her to acknowledge that there are problems and to go more slowly in addressing them, Emily is ready by the end to mount this space and tiptoe back to reality.

I heard someone on the way out saying that he wished we were given more information about the background of the (fictional) protagonist. I can’t agree. For me, the fact that we learn only as much as Emily learns in the course of the play is very moving in the way it places us in her position. (Kopit’s father had suffered a stroke and the piece bristles with empathy.) Ending in an extraordinary sequence that re-enacts a moment of fear overcome in the aviator’s past, this is a production that has a head for heights and is warmly recommended.