Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter

Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter

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Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter
Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter
Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter: What's On This Week (Oct 22-28)

Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter: What's On This Week (Oct 22-28)

"You Are Under Arrest!" Proper Job Theatre adapt Franz Kafka's novel The Trial. Plus -- The last flight of Amy Johnson and why it matters so much to women (Lone Flyer review)

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Liz Ryan
Oct 21, 2021
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Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter
Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter
Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter: What's On This Week (Oct 22-28)
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A wooden trolley stands in for an early flying machine in Ade Morris's play Lone Flyer.
Louise Willoughby as Amy Johnson in Lone Flyer. Photo credit: Ben Wilkin

Pioneering air ace Amy Johnson met her death in the icy waters of the Thames Estuary on January 5th, 1941. Ade Morris’s script for Lone Flyer, ostensibly the story of this final, disastrous journey, does little to explain why Britain’s leading aviatrix — who made record-breaking solo flights to Australia and South Africa — was assigned in wartime to a supposedly safe support role, delivering new planes to their appointed UK air field. Instead it aims to get under the skin of this much-photographed woman, whose self-consciousness about her missing front teeth (knocked out during a game of cricket when she was a teenager) meant she often turned to the camera with a stony face.

One cannot over-estimate Amy Johnson’s fame during the 1930s. She was introduced to Presidents and hobnobbed with Charlie Chaplin and Bernard Shaw. She did (with first boyfriend Hans Arregger) at a time when nice girls still didn’t. And her mar…

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