Review - A Prayer for Wings at the King's Head Theatre

Director Sean Mathias is currently represented on the West End stage by staging the intimate, wonderful and deeply personal Ian McKellen On Stage with Tolkien, Shakespeare, Others and YOU, and as a long-time collaborator (and former partner) of the actor, he's ideally placed to gain McKellen's trust to expose himself so openly and winningly in this show.

But at the beginning of his own career as an actor-turned--playwright, Mathias also allowed his own family history to feed into his early play A Prayer for Wings, originally premiered on the Edinburgh Fringe in 1985. In a programme note, he explains, "I realised I was basing much of it on the experiences of watching my mother nursing my father as he lay dying on a bed in our front room when he could no longer climb the stairs to the bedroom."

Here it is a 20-year-old daughter Rita who is nursing her mother, who is just 40, but dying of multiple sclerosis in the front room of their Swansea home, which used to be a local church.

The play, which won a Fringe First in its original 1985 Edinburgh run, now marks a couple more firsts as its returns to London, The production was premiered at Swansea's Grand Theatre, under the auspices of Volcano Theatre, in the summer, and now marks the Grand's first transfer to London in 122 years. But it also marks a homecoming for Mathias to the King's Head, where he also directed one of his other early plays, and is now at the helm again (the original production was directed by veteran actor Joan Plowright).

Mathias' command as a fine director of actors is more evident than his early attempts at dramaturgy, with the play flowing a little uneasily in and out of intimate scenes between mother and daughter or the daughter and the various men she picks up in the town, and monologues addressed to the audience. But the pacing covers the flawed structure, and it is well supported by Lee Newby's atmospheric set and Adam Cork's resonant soundscape.  It is also poignantly acted by an all-Welsh cast that comprises Llinos Daniel as the bed-bound mam, Alis Wyn Davies as her trapped daughter Rita, and Luke Rhodri as the three pick-ups Rita brings home.

A Prayer for Wings is at the King's Head Theatre to 23rd November.