Juliet Stevenson is a national treasure more for serious than fluffy reasons, but even so, it’s sometimes easy to forget how adventurous some of her acting choices have been. On her last major London stage appearance, for instance, she was buried up to her waist, then up to her neck, in shale eight times a week in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. Now she returns to the same Young Vic stage and the same director, Natalie Abrahami, in the first London revival of Arthur Kopit’s play Wings in 30-odd years, and she’s making up for all that immobility.

You might not – be honest, there’s no way you would – expect what Abrahami and Stevenson have cooked up, given that the protagonist of Kopit’s play is an elderly woman who has suffered a stroke. But Kopit is concerned not with her physical recovery, but with the painful reconstruction of her mind and in particular her means of expression. For Emily Stilson has been stricken with aphasia and has to rebuild almost from scratch her entire grasp of language and to an extent her very identity.

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: anything from clinical literalism to wild metaphor is endorsed (anything except, for some reason, a wheelchair).

And if this review so far has been keeping you in suspense, that’s exactly what happens onstage. Literally. Stevenson 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; when we hear her interior monologue she is at first adrift in empty space, then tumbling to no distinct end as she finds words piecemeal, stitches them clumsily together and sometimes conjures up entirely imaginary groups of syllables.

It’s a stroke of genius, driven by the detail that Emily in her far-off youth was a stunt flier and in particular a wing-walker. Her aerial control here and now comes with recollections of her days on the wing, but principally as her ability to express herself slowly reforms. Stevenson rises (ha) to the challenge triumphantly. She has to surrender some physical control for the performance, but always conveys Emily’s personality and travails. Such wackiness is usually gratuitous, but here it’s intimately connected with the character’s past and present.

The Young Vic’s artistic director David Lan certainly shows no signs of going out with a whimper at the end of his remarkable 18-year tenure, and his recently announced successor Kwame Kwei-Armah is just as keenly awaited. Perhaps the theatre should investigate sponsorship from a major sportswear company; imagine all the staff wearing shirts that announced, “Under Armah”...!

Written for The Lady.