While this might seem irrelevant – what about the show? – it’s very much to the point. On her honeymoon the very innocent Millie is all in a tizzy because she hasn’t a clue what to do in bed. Her mother had told her to lie back and think of England and, by the end of a night of fumbling, “I had really now thought of every possible corner of England”, including the late Queen on the Isle of Wight, inconsolable after losing her dear Albert.During the play Millie turns into something of a snob and a monster – she feels jealous of her beautiful actress daughter – yet despite this we continue to feel sympathy for the character.Redgrave, who also directed the play, has a real talent for communicating the despair that comes from a life unlived; the nightingale of the title represents a freedom of spirit that Millie has never known. We catch glimpses of Mildred (superbly played by Caroline John) as a girl praying to God in church; on the night of her honeymoon in Paris; trying to cope with the trials and tribulations of motherhood; enduring a loveless marriage; and experiencing the promise of passion with a Devon farmer.
This last scene is beautifully played out; the couple hardly touch, not much is said, but Millie weeps “for that which I cannot have, for that which I will never know”.While Redgrave’s monologue never approaches the lyrical beauty of poetry like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s and Thomas Hood’s, both quoted in the course of the evening, the play is full of touching, poignant and quite funny moments. While some might regard Redgrave’s ambition to capture the essence of a person in a 75-minute play as a foolhardy enterprise, it has to be said that – for the most part – Nightingale works because the play confines itself to 11 scenes, mere snapshots of existence.

The result is her new, one-woman play Nightingale that tells the story of Mildred Asher, a fictional character based on her maternal grandmother, Beatrice Kempson, from girlhood to old age. When actress and writer Lynn Redgrave – best known for her roles in films such as Georgy Girl, Gods and Monsters, Shine and Kinsey – came across her grandmother’s grave and found that her name had been washed away by acid rain she started to think about the themes of memory and remembrance. the still, quiet moment at the top of the pendulum swing when I weigh what feels like nothing”. It’s at this juncture that the previous 60 minutes’ activity suddenly snaps into focus as a dreamy death-wish, an act of imaginative nihilism. “This is the point,” she informs spectators darkly as she lurches out over their heads, “when I have most potential to jump”.jenny.gilbert independent.co.ukGardner Arts Centre, Brighton (01273 685861) Tues; Oxford Playhouse (01865 305305) Thurs & Fri. It’s moments like this that impress on you the extent of this young woman’s strength and skill.

Generally she makes it look easy.The text also carries a hint of confession. Junkie-like, we learn, the aerialist craves particular sensations – “the twist, the turn, the drop” – and must have them again and again Most of all she relishes “the dead point … A looped rope proves surprisingly versatile, serving as mirror, lover’s face, pregnant belly, child, and thus the narrative returns to the point where it began. On a loop, as it were.The third piece, “Dead Point”, is performed on a rope swing, with spoken text written by Bryony Lavery. At last we are invited to share the whooshing thrill of flight, as Leyser muscles up the momentum for an almighty swing, then supplies a running commentary on the physics of it.

She speaks lyrically (between panting breaths) of the sensation of displaced air, reclining full-length and turning languidly on her thin cradle of rope to feel the rush of it. Once, she reminds us, we were all attached by a rope – the umbilical cord. In a few deft moves she has knotted herself a womb and curled up in it, snug and tight, until a slip-knot slowly lowers her to the floor to be born. She straightens out, learns to sit, to crawl, to stand, to walk, then re-discovers the rope and learns to climb it. Jonathan Lever’s music drops single pitches of clarinet or piano into a still pool of white noise.
“Life-Line”, performed on a rope, tells a more obvious story, as Leyser acts out a life, from birth to old age. “Night-Plane” – choreographed by Rosemary Lee – takes the form of a journey across a vast black curtain, an uncertain and shifting landscape of thick dark folds that occasionally threaten to swallow Leyser’s dark-clad form.

Hand- and foot-holds are cunningly stitched into the curtain, allowing her sometimes to recline as if in some invisible chair, wrestle invisible demons, or swim through empty black space. At one point she pops through an aperture with the drape gathered from her waist, like some full-skirted Victorian maid leaning out of a window to shake a duster. At another she explores her environment with the sensuality of an animal, passing folds of fabric inch by inch between her toes or gripping it gently between her teeth. Her show Line, Point, Plane takes its title from an essay about art by the painter Kandinsky, but each of its three parts is also about the human condition, particularly the apparent paradox that the same physical experiences can make us feel both vulnerable and exhilarated. Enter Matilda Leyser, a literature graduate turned aerialist who has turned her mind to the poetic potential of being suspended high in the air. Through the Naumanns, then, directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel grind out their theme of personal redemption Predictable? Like the alphabet.. Call me unimaginative, but I’ve always found circus aerial acts a bit of a bore – all that posturing as superhuman, while it’s obvious that physical possibilities can only be limited by hanging upside down.