Director Natalie Abrahami wasn’t able to give her imagistic preferences full rein the last time she worked with Juliet Stevenson at the Young Vic: as Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days, Stevenson was buried up to her waist then up to her neck in shale, which doesn’t exactly offer a broad visual palette. Now, however, in the first London revival of Arthur Kopit’s play in 30-odd years, all such yearnings are gloriously liberated in an audacious, expressionist presentation.

Kopit originally wrote his play for radio, so the staging of this expanded version is comparatively unprescribed in any case. The range of potential approaches is limitless: Wings portrays a woman who, after a stroke, suffers from aphasia and has agonisingly to reconstruct her entire grasp of language, her very means of self-expression or even self-identification, so anything from clinical literalism to wild metaphor is endorsed (anything except, for some reason, a wheelchair). The character of Emily Stilson, moreover, was in her youth a stunt flier and in particular a wing-walker.

Abrahami and Stevenson have taken a deep breath and gone for it. The performer spends the entire hour and a quarter in a flying harness; when Emily is being examined by clinicians or undergoing speech therapy, her feet touch the floor (usually at one end of the traverse stage, slightly raised and behind transparent gauzes); when we hear her interior monologue she is at first adrift in space, then tumbling or spasming but to no distinct end as she finds words piecemeal, stitches them clumsily together and sometimes conjures up entirely imaginary groups of syllables. Aerial control comes with waking and dreaming recollections of her days as an aviatrix, but principally as her ability to express herself slowly re-coalesces.

It’s an audacious concept, but Stevenson rises to the challenge, literally. She has to surrender a certain amount physical autonomy for the performance, but always conveys Emily’s personality and travails. Most of the rest of the cast work in ensemble, but Lorna Brown gets a defined role as the principal speech therapist. It’s not often that a staging like this makes perfect sense without at the same time seeming a radical departure from theatrical orthodoxy. It makes for a thrilling dramatic realisation.

Written for the Financial Times.