Wings of January

Seven people meet on an early morning train in London to travel to a room in a pub in Brighton, where they will perform Shakespeare’ s Twelfth Night with autistic people, twice. By four o clock they will be done for the day. This is Flute Theatre, this is 2025, these people are actors and a musician, this journey is normal, their task is sublime, the day’s sea is a storm, the play owns a calm, each of these people has an aching belief that the world could and should be a better, fairer, and more equal place though they would never say it out loud, the action of turning up on this train expresses more than words can say.

The actors and the musician set up the space in the room in the pub in Brighton. They make a circle of tape on the floor, big enough to act in and big enough to sit around for the two performances of Twelfth Night. Inside this circle in the room in the pub in Brighton, they will share the splitting of a ship, the inspiration of escape, the ecstasy of love, the lunacy of romance, the excess of drink, the power of a horse and the unimaginable reunion of loved ones who believe the other to be drowned. The musician sets up her glockenspiel, shakers, whistles, bongos and her singing bowls. She will be at the heart of the action and yet barely anyone will look at her. The actors get some coffee and go to an even smaller room together, to change their clothes. Their new clothes will all connect in warm yellows and oranges. For contrast one of the actors wears bright red leggings which has earned him his nickname of Danger Legs.

The actors and the musician, in their costumes, move out of the room and into the actual pub in Brighton where seven autistic people wait at random tables throughout the room, with their carers, their teams, their medication, their toys, their props of comfort, their weighted blankets, their coats, their scarves, their hats, their gloves, their kitten ear headbands, their ear defenders, their squeezy stress balls, their iPhones, their iPads and their electronic means of communication, one is wearing a full size Buzz Lightyear helmet and another wears cat's ears and a tail. They are all eighteen years old or more. One is standing and jumping, the others sit. The actors approach and start to sing repeated Hellos in the rhythm of a steady heartbeat, beating the rhythm on their hearts with their hands, filling the room with resonant sound accompanied by the musician on a shaker.

They add in the names of each of the autistic people to the singing framework of the Hellos and the history and deep emotional connection that some of the actors have with some of the autistic people, who have known each other for many years, is such that simply seeing their faces and singing their names makes some of the actors want to cry. They had sung to them for fifteen months through a zoom screen during the pandemic and have continued to share extended moments of emotional attention together in the years since. The singing transforms the pub in Brighton into a womblike space in which the actors welcome their audience of seven autistic people, easing the transition from one space to another with the rhythm of a heartbeat which is the first sound, mixed in with your mothers, that you ever hear before you are born. The girl behind the bar of the pub continues to clear up bottles from the night before and prepare for her day. It is eleven twenty in the morning.

At eleven thirty, the seven autistic people shed their outward trappings, save the cat ears and tail, and move with the actors and musician, still singing, into the room at the side of the pub in Brighton to share in a dreamscape of sounds, colours, emotions, rhythms, movements and sensations held together by a play by Shakespeare, itself inspired by an Italian comedy of mistaken identity written at least thirty years before Shakespeare was born. Around the circle, the actors sit evenly spaced with the seven autistic people sitting beside them. Constraints of time and space are suspended now and all assembled assume a silent permission to be their best selves. The musician chimes a three-point bell. It all begins. The actors share their storms, their romances and their jokes using bite size sensory games which the autistic people receive and inhabit, using repeated rhythms, sounds and gestures that soothe and stimulate.

One of the autistic people who had been so excited about the performance is finding it hard to regulate himself, he pins himself to the floor, as a starfish does to a seabed, his voice moaning and laughing - it’s hard to differentiate. Three people, including two of the actors hold his hands offering pressure with massage waiting for the wave of emotion to make its final crash and pass. Meanwhile the play continues, as the actors and the musician modulate themselves so as not to disturb the starfish but still hold the attention of the others. Finally at eleven forty five the final wave has passed and our seventh person proceeds to engage with the play, leaping out of his body, calling out from his voice and joyfully clapping his hands at the lifeblood of the sensations. Outside the room in the pub in Brighton the sea whips up its storm, high crest after high crest of foamy English channel crashing way out at sea, swallowing ghosts of an imagined dolphin carrying a lost twin on its back like Arion holding acquaintance with the waves. Some of the carers and teams who have travelled with the autistic people but aren’t needed in the room breathe out deeply and stare into their middle distance.

Inside the room in the pub in Brighton it is one o clock, the story has concluded, the twins are reunited. Each autistic person has taken a turn to close their eyes and step closer and closer toward an actor who is singing their name, exposing and expressing the fragility of impossible reunions with our loved ones. Now time to finish. The actors and the musician sing Heartbeat Goodbyes to prepare the seven autistic people for their transition out of the dreamscape of Illyria and back into the main room of the Brunswick pub where all trappings await. The actors and the musician will continue singing their Heartbeat Goodbyes until the last of the seven autistic people have made their way onto Holland Road Brighton, into a minibus and back to Scrummys for lunch. The bar of the pub is ready for the day.

The seven people are Millie, Carina, Leona, Tash, Jacob, Mercedes and Josh. I thank them from the bottom of my heart.