Stevenson harnesses her versatility
Wings Young Vic
★★★★★
In the past two years, Juliet Stevenson has proved to be the most exciting and versatile actress on stage. She was a sexually awakened Gertrude in Robert Icke’s Hamlet, played both the title role of Mary
Stuart and Elizabeth I to dazzling effect in a production (being revived on tour next year) by the same director and excavated the long-buried compassion of Winnie in Beckett’s
Happy Days at the Young Vic. It’s to this theatre she returns, with a certain degree of Beckettian dislocation, as Emily Stilson, a former aviatrix and wing-walker trying to piece together her shattered mind after a stroke.
Stevenson spends the entire 75 minutes of this revival of Arthur Kopit’s 1978 Broadway hit in a harness, often suspended off the ground. As Emily tries to relive past glories in aviation, Stevenson sweeps across the stage like a haunted Peter Pan – sometimes with ecstatic somersaults, at others her prone body suggests the imprisonment of her aphasia. It’s a dexterous, physically fearless performance from the 60-year-old and that fabulously smoky, eloquent voice, knotted here into an Ivy League-ish bark, conveys the fragmented poetry of Kopits’s stream-of-consciousness dialogue beautifully. On the ground, doctors and nurses try to connect with the inchoate Emily. She cannot identify everyday objects, she thinks those around her may have taken her hostage but, through jagged shards of humour (often implicit in Stevenson’s portrayal rather than Kopit’s text), we are drawn into her inner reality, which offers a more substantial version of the truth than the real world.
Natalie Abrahami’s production works hard to elucidate Kopit’s occasionally over-intellectualised script, while Michael Levine’s clean, linear set design contrasts clearly with Emily’s mental disconnections (while the projections of mountains and soaring skylines somehow enhance it). This is absolutely not an ensemble piece and it is frustrating that Kopit allows his supporting cast to do very little other than respond (although former Eternal star Kéllé Bryan gives a touching, all too-brief account of a voluble mental patient).
Plays about illness tend to – how can I put this sensitively? – descend into mawkishness. Wings, written by Kopit after his father suffered a stroke and inspired by two female patients with whom he shared a facility, is commendably, perhaps fiercely, unsentimental. And yet this also creates a problem. The play lacks an emotional heart, which often makes it hard to engage with Emily’s plight. Only when she struggles to remember her children and notes that “time has become peculiar” do we really feel the devastation of her out-of-joint existence. Matters aren’t helped by the play’s final third, in which a therapist called Amy (a slightly too remote Lorna Brown) tries to dissemble Emily’s use of language. The relationship between therapist and patient should be a gift for any dramatist but here it is halting, not fully finished. You don’t necessarily expect a resolution, but you do expect some sort of human connection.
Stevenson’s Emily is humorous and defiant – a literally transcendent figure. Yet even she fails to soar above the limitations of the play.
Until Nov 4. Tickets: 020 7922 2922; youngvic.org