Startling and Intimate THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS a Triumph for Lara Foot at the Baxter Theatre Centre

Lara Foot's latest play, THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS, has been seven years in the making. Since Foot started dreaming up this startling, intimate tale about the challenges of living with a mental disorder, both as a patient and a caregiver, she has premiered the much-revised text that became SOLOMON AND MARION (2011) and FISHERS OF HOPE (2014). THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS soars past these two recent plays, achieving the same rich fulfilment of the promise that Foot's first original play, TSHEPANG, embodied in 2003.

Taking place in mostly in reverse chronology, from 1995 - 1961, THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS documents the story of a man, Andrew (Andrew Buckland), whose wife, Sara (Jennifer Steyn), lives with bipolar disorder. Andrew seems unable to determine his existence as one separate from his wife's. Despite her ups and downs and attempts at suicide, Andrew never resorts to involuntary hospitalisation, preferring to seek support from a close friend of the couple, James (Mncedisi Shabangu). A professor of psychiatry, James is a black man who lives in a suburban house in Pretoria, partly because of a loophole in the apartheid government's legislation. Sara's highs, as typically seen in people with bipolar disorder, are not only characterised by energy, rapturous joy and heightened activity but also by an intensified prickliness. Her lows are almost unimaginably hopeless. James helps his friends as much as he is able, but a kiss between him and Sara in full view of her husband early on in the play hints at secrets from the past that are revealed incrementally to the audience in this tale of co-dependency, addiction and dysfunction.

Foot's writing is in THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS is both sophisticated and literate, and the piece is very much a playwright's play. It is impossible to watch THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS without recalling the similarly structured BETRAYAL by Harold Pinter, which also focuses on the relationship between two men and a woman's complicated relationship with both. This is not to say that THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS is derivative; rather, it is a play that can be located within a tradition of playwriting. What distinguishes THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS from other plays within that tradition is Foot's great care in selecting only the conventions that that illuminate the themes of her play, which is richly textured and exists on its own terms.

A work that is rich in motifs, THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS is built around the symbol of an angel. The play calls on the tradition of angels as beings that nurture, counsel and heal. Andrew is Sara's angel; James is Andrew's. But what about James? Who is his angel? In some ways, both Andrew and Sara are, but the lack of a discernible figure fulfilling this role in the psychiatrist's life references a question that many people have in the back of their minds when it comes to therapeutic intervention: who counsels the counsellor?

James's blackness also comes into play, with the vast majority of THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS taking place during the apartheid era. If the personal is inherently political, as the play argues, who were and are the angels for non-white South Africans? And bringing the circle back to the field of mental health, who are the angels for non-white South Africans with mental disorders? In this narrative, Sara has her husband and access to health care, but about her counterparts from other ethno-racial backgrounds in the historical and present contexts of this country?

The prompting of thought pathways such as these is partly where the genius of Foot's writing in THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS lies. She allows the characters to speak as characters, not as representations of ideas, even though each character is very clearly constructed to represent certain ideas. This choice allows the audience to remain invested in the dramatic action of the play, the layers of which reveal themselves after the curtain has fallen.

Foot also references one specific angel in her text, Gabriel García Márquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings". Although THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS does not stand or fall by the audience's knowledge of the story, it is worth a read before watching the play. Foot's also grounds her work through thorough research, with particular references points being AN ANTHROPOLOGIST ON MARS by Oliver Sacks, AN UNQUIET MIND by Kay Redfield Jamison and ADDICTIVE THINKING by Abraham J Twerski.

The complexity of Foot's writing demands that exceptional performances bring THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS to life. Jennifer Steyn, Andrew Buckland and Mncedisi Shabangu all deliver meaningful work in this production under the playwright's own skilfully shaped direction of the piece. Steyn and Buckland invest their characters with a raw vulnerability that makes their onstage relationship arresting throughout the production. Shabangu, on the other hand, constructs barrier upon barrier around James, his pain finding expression most openly in a scene where Sara attempts to seduce him. All three actors are subtle and skilful, drawing on the many nuances of the text to inform their individual performances and their work as an ensemble.

While the Jive Funny Festival plays the Theatre, THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS has been programmed into the Golden Arrow Studio. While the intimacy of the space is wonderful for an intensely personal play such as this, be warned: the back two rows offer obstructed viewing, especially on the right-hand side of the theatre. The height of Patrick Curtis's set design means that the floor level of the Studio has been lowered. This obscures the action that has been placed downstage, with the audience in the back rows on the right, for example, unable to see almost in its entirely an exquisitely written scene that takes place in a bathtub downstage left.

The scenic design itself is defined by a grey box set that serves as a backdrop for the multiple settings of the play. Recalling the brutalist architectural style that was in fashion in the 1960s and 1970s, the dull cement-like appearance of the gigantic walls dominates the space, like the greyness of a medicated brain threatens to dominate the mind of a bipolar person on lithium. Mannie Manim's lighting gives the audience no refuge from those walls, except during the interludes between each episode of the script, in which a tone of magical realism is invoked through Buckland's physicalization of an angelic being through choreography by Grant van Ster. Birrie le Roux's costumes are remarkable, allowing the characters to pop against the grey background in scenes where they are active, whilst enabling the actors to blend into the scenery as though they exist in the recesses of memory when they are disconnected from the action. Phillip Miller's evocative sound design and Sanjin Muftic's scenic epigraphs complete the visual and aural environment in which THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS plays out cohesively.

THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS is filled with beautifully crafted scenes, intimate detail and superbly theatrical moments. It is unforgiving in its presentation of the social stigmas experienced not only by people suffering from a disorder that has no precise mechanism that activates it but also by those who care for them. The apartheid setting lends more than a mere context against which the action plays out, and while it reveals the culture of oppression to which those living with mental illnesses are subjected, what makes the play masterful is its exploration of the people that surround their patients and what keeps them there in the face of such a severe reality.

THE INCONVENIENCE OF WINGS runs at the Baxter Theatre until 13 August at 19:30 nightly, with Saturday matinees at 14:30. Booking is online through Computicket, by phone on 0861 915 8000, or at any Shoprite Checkers outlet. For corporate, block or school bookings, charities and fundraisers, contact Sharon Ward on 021 680 3962 or Carmen Kearns on 021 680 3993. The play carries an age restriction of PG16, due to nudity and language.