17 – 19 April

Directed by Tom Stabb and written by Matt Roberts, What’s Next? is based upon the largely forgotten story of a remarkable woman, Harriet Quimby. She was a pioneer aviator whose notable achievements include being the first American woman to gain a pilot’s licence and in 1912 becoming the first woman to fly across the English Channel. Her name might be more familiar to us were it not for the fact that her triumphant channel flight was achieved the day after the Titanic disaster, which for many weeks relegated any celebratory stories to the back pages.

Appropriately for a play about solo flight, What’s Next? is a one-woman show, with Victoria Lucie depicting Quimby as a go-getting ball of energy, with little regard for conventional views about what constituted acceptable behaviour for women. We see her sat at the controls of her aircraft, preparing for that channel flight and waiting for the fog to clear. She banters with the disembodied voice of her guardian angel, whose golden wings can be glimpsed through the clouds. When reminiscing about arguments she has had in the past with powerful men she comically re-enacts their confrontations, depicting men utterly baffled by a young woman with a mind of her own. In the years before she took to the air Quimby had already broken new ground both as a magazine journalist and as a Hollywood screenwriter. In the latter role we see her having the temerity to tell the great D W Griffith that she disapproves of his romanticised portrayals of womanhood.

Victoria Lucie’s dynamic, compelling performance very effectively re-imagines Quimby as a feisty and uncompromising feminist. Was she in reality? There is a passing reference to the fact that she was not admired by members of the suffragette movement, with the suggestion that this was because they saw her as being interested only in her own advancement, and not the progress of women in general. The manner in which she exploited her own good looks would surely have been a factor in their disapproval. Though What’s Next? depicts her as scornful of being called the ‘Dresden China Aviatrix’, there is little doubt that much of her popularity at airshows and in the press rested upon her petite prettiness. Photographs show the real-life Quimby playing up to that image in her bespoke purple flying suit. This is a thoroughly engaging portrayal of a young woman as an unstoppable force of nature but Quimby  was surely a more complex and possibly more conflicted character than is suggested in this rather one dimensional portrait.

What’s Next? serves to remind us that there was a time not so long ago when to fly was a dangerous adventure that could offer an enterprising woman a new sense of freedom and independence, denied to her earthbound sisters. Tragically Harriet Quimby experienced that freedom all too briefly, for she was killed in a flying accident just months after her triumphant cross-channel flight.

★★★☆☆  Mike Whitton, 19 April 2024