Writer: Matt Roberts
Director: Tom Stabb
What’s Next? must have been the question on everyone’s lips in the first few years of the twentieth century, a time of great advancement and achievement. And those advances are coming quicker and quicker – from steam locomotion in the early nineteenth century to internal combustion engines that were light and powerful enough to be used by the Wright brothers when they demonstrated powered flight in 1903. Of course, once something is known to be possible then advances tumble over one another and flying circuses where daredevil aviators showed off their skills to admiring crowds below soon shot up. What Next? indeed.
One can only wonder what the crowds must have made of the daring young men (and, of course, they WERE men) in their flying machines at the 1910 International Aviation Meet at Belmont Park, New York. One attendee was Harriet Quimby who was immediately inspired to learn to fly herself – and became the first woman to hold a pilot’s license in America in 1911. And the first woman to fly the English Channel in 1912.
Quimby already had experience in breaking the glass ceiling: her self-confidence and self-belief helped her to gain positions as a journalist and screenwriter when her family relocated, first to San Francisco and later to New York. But it was as a pilot that she gained notoriety. And here, Middle-Weight Theatre allows her to tell her own story.
It’s a one-woman show, which places significant demands on the actor, in this case, Victoria Lucie. Lucie completely inhabits Quimby with an enthusiasm for flying and, indeed life, that is infectious. We learn of her determination to achieve whatever she sets her mind to; a proto-feminist, she seems not to dwell on an abstract feminism for the greater good, but rather rails against the artificial constraints on her purely because of her sex – one artefact of this being the specially designed plum-coloured flying suit she wore to fly and which has been recreated for Lucie by Hannah Marshall. Lucie’s Quimby is bubbly, witty and fiercely intelligent. Her face is incredibly mobile showing us the many emotions Quimby goes through en route to her momentous flight.
Aircraft of the time were necessarily small and cramped which could lead to a static staging. However, the simple set design from Chrissy Marshall and Lez Street, incorporating video effects as background and supported by the lively direction of Tom Stabb ensure that our attention is firmly grasped from the off. In their notes, the originators of Middle-Weight Theatre, Stabb and writer Matt Roberts, profess to a shared love of ‘razor-sharp dialogue and comedy’ and that is certainly reflected in the writing tonight, with wordplay perfectly delivered by Lucie – one is unlikely to forget her dismantling of the contemporary description of Quimby as the ‘Dresden China Aviatrix’.
Unfortunately, Quimby’s achievement was overshadowed by other events and she never got to see her dream of a shrinking world connected by air travel realised, a dream that was delayed somewhat by what actually did come next – the Great War in which, for the first time, aircraft played a role.
Middle-Weight Theatre has produced a quirky and thought-provoking piece that is both entertaining and informative – and which allows us to reflect on the perennial question: in a world in which technology continues to accelerate its advancement and in which politics plays to the lowest common denominator, what IS next?
Runs until 18 May 2024 and on tour