Created and Performed by James Rowland

Tickets: £15 (Con. available)

What makes a show a show? What makes theatre theatre?

Is it the set, costumes, sound design, scripting, or characterisation? Aesthetically, very likely. But can a one-hander where the mechanics of storytelling come from the intimacy of the stripped-back nature carry what many consider to be a theatrical experience? It’s not a new debate, by any stretch of the imagination, though the Pandemic certainly tossed the question into the air once more.

Previous Edinburgh Festival Fringe hit, and delayed returning show Learning to Fly is in many ways a story which will strike familiar (at least in tone and theme) for many, though hopefully with less recreational drug use (no judgment here). A story about connections, time and its reported healing properties. So, set at the end of the road from a childhood home road in a ramshackle and overgrown home lives a witch: terrifying, elderly, and hunched with hatred for sunlight, noise, and little boys. But James Rowland’s new touring show isn’t a fairytale. Instead, this eclectic and captivating piece of storytelling theatre, music, and comedy finds Rowland sharing their story of a remarkable friendship: two lonely, unhappy people meeting, one older, one a younger James. And his endeavour to help his neighbour Anne have one last ecstasy-filled adventure. And we mean that quite literally.

James Rowland is an accomplished performer who commands a lot with very little – at least in terms of physical manifestations of expectant elements. As a storyteller, and yes, theatre maker, they weave experience and rhetoric. Rowland’s Learning to Fly is an exceptional masterpiece of lacing narrative and a damned funny piece of intimate theatre. With a fluid control of time and space, Rowland turns the barren stage into a blossoming visual with description and gentile movement. One second the Trav 2 is Anne’s book-laden living area, next a school playground as we’re scouting out the Big Lad to make a score. The words swirl around Rowland and the audience and land and sprout into scenes – it’s masterful storytelling, with some killer and authentic comedy that naturally makes us hang on Rowland’s words.

The more added to this production, the more it would likely suffer. Any additional elements of design would clutter the purity of Rowland’s intentions and charm – what Learning to Fly benefits from is the intimacy and proximity of the event: Rowland, an audience, and time. That’s all they need. Oh, and an extract of Ode to Joy to seal the deal. The subtlety in the storytelling is sublime, even down to the manipulation of time as Rowland channels their words through the mouth of their younger self. So much of the production conjures Rowland’s elderly neighbour as just that, an elderly, decrepit spinster hiding away in the shadow: she’s sixty. But to the younger self, that is ‘elderly’. The way Learning to Fly is told is fascinating in how it transcends time in this manner, but it also shifts in the dynamic of physical and delivery. Rowland gradually alters the language, tone, and temper of their voice to ‘age’ themselves in a young teen, and to de-witchy his neighbour as the pair grows more accustomed and Rowland’s life experiences become more mature. 

Much of this comes from Rowland’s disarming candour and ad-libs, which from the off extend beyond the barriers of the show’s starting point and conclusion. Perhaps a touch too impersonal, occasionally straying from the path – but the destination is still the same, regardless of tangents. But for as much as comedy and heart take a more obvious and active role, throughout the show a third mechanic of communication, a more universal one, has been present throughout: music. Rowland’s only prop is a small portable record player with a single record, a well-used copy of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony – Symphony No.9 in D minor. There’s a reason it’s one of the most performed symphonies of all time. And as the four-season shift, and the emotions and prestige so succinctly tied into Rowland’s story evolve, it makes for a wonderfully metaphorical and appropriate foundation for the show as it traverses life, adversity, the cacophonies of trauma, and the explosion of passion.

The significant beauty is that Rowland’s Learning to Fly doesn’t allow the various memories to shackle them and instead investigates the past as a freeing and feathered opportunity to relax and open their ears to the music surrounding them. With all the humour and tremendously hilarious anecdotes and surprises involved, it is the more sombre and slow moments which leave the most distinct impression from this remarkably gifted yarn-spinner.