As someone with chronic fatigue, it’s difficult to write objectively about this play. It had delicacy and gentle humour, at times making me smile and at times breaking me and my heart. I found myself looking around the audience, wondering how many people were there hoping to come away with some insight into an illness or a source of sadness. I suspect I wasn’t the only one.
The play is well acted with Esther’s mother Penn standing out as really superb; both the space and the actor’s bodies were used effectively to transport the audience to both a small girl’s darkened bedroom, and various scenes in a fairy kingdom. The world of the fairy Rhy, was a poetic metaphor for Esther’s suffering, so much of which comes from her belief that she must somehow have caused her illness.
There were moments when I felt a genuine chill of something approaching horror, but I was pulled from the darkness in the same way that the young heroin is pulled back from the darkness – hope for her is hope for the audience.
I was moved by the dawning of hope for Esther but her sudden positivity didn’t sit entirely well with me. My preoccupation with the details of the happy ending – “yes, but how is a fairy with one wing going to fly? How is she going to ger better?” probably says more about me than they do about Only One Wing.
A good play, a brave topic, and a reviewer who went home and cried her eyes out.
4/5 
Miriam Prosser
Loading ...