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Lone Flyer: The Last Flight of Amy Johnson review – soaring spirit

Amy Johnson is, in many ways, still the epitome of the romantic female adventurer. Finding international fame as the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia in 1930, she lived fast and died young, breaking a host of records before crashing to her death at the age of 37.

In this revival of Ade Morris’s 2001 play about her life, we glimpse the woman behind the celebrity pilot and aviation engineer, as frustrated by social convention as she was determined to embrace adventure. We meet Johnson in her dying moments and her life flashes before our eyes over the course of the play. We flit back and forth from that frantic, final flight to her early years in Hull and at Sheffield University, then to finding her passion for flying and meeting the loves of her life.

Lucy Betts’s direction navigates a socially-distanced stage so cleverly that we barely notice the lack of touch between its two actors. In flying jacket and cap, Hannah Edwards, as Johnson, is spirited, sparky and full of yearning for a remarkable life . She steers between steeliness and vulnerability in the narration of her story, while Benedict Salter switches with virtuosity between several roles, including Johnson’s gentle father, her remote first lover, Franz, and her husband and fellow pilot, Jim Mollison.

It is Johnson’s poetic subjectivity that leads the storytelling and the script zings with colour as she speaks of a near-drowning in a “huge fist of sea” – the freezing waves were “a million needles of icy hot”. She refers to wartime zeppelins as “flying badgers” and to a teacher who has “a face like cold suet pudding”.

A revolving trolley is the central prop and mostly functions as Johnson’s Gipsy Moth plane. Jamie Kubisch-Wiles and Thom Townsend’s sound design, together with Harry Armytage’s lighting, signal scene changes without any other big shifts in the set. The sea is suggested by undulating white light; a cinema hall is evoked with flickering illumination and piano music; and the sound of a school bell or an aeroplane engine’s thrum instantly create an atmosphere, alongside the eloquence of Morris’s script.

It is clear that Johnson is a maverick, pushing against norms to be the woman she wants to be rather than the “teacher or nurse” she is expected to become. She speaks of her fear of being stuck in an unfulfilled life which, it is hinted, led her sister to kill herself. Travelling through a series of dull jobs, from a typing pool to the lingerie department of Peter Jones and a law firm, she finally trades it in for a “more precarious existence at Stag Lane aerodrome” in London.

Her dilemmas feel strangely – even sadly –contemporary as she reflects on marriage, motherhood and personal freedom. “Love makes me dependent and I hate that it saps all my adventure,” she says, though she craves it, too.

The play also, obliquely, shows how the world judges female heroism. She is described as a “blonde” and as a “daughter” by the press, even after her extraordinary accomplishments as a pilot. At the height of her fame, she seems to be caught in an uncomfortable and intrusive alliance with the press. “Fame is like battery acid – use it, don’t drink it,” she says, almost as a warning to herself.

This aspect, while not heavily investigated, again feels contemporary and reminiscent of the way in which adventuring women such as the late Alison Hargreaves – the first female mountaineer to scale Everest alone and without supplementary oxygen – have been judged.

Discordant cello music signals a return to her final moments in the air. It sounds slightly shrill by the end and we return to this scene too often, but the play holds its power right until that final crash, and all the hope of a magnificent, adventuring life in it.

At the Watermill theatre, Newbury, until 21 November.