Brighton Fringe 2026
Flight: One Man’s Journey
Pricking Thumbs Theatre
Genre: Solo Show, Storytelling
Venue: The Lantern Theatre
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
Flight is a piece of solo theatre storytelling “bringing 21 vivid characters to life”. Written by Martin Lytton and directed by Jacquie Crago, and performed by Naz Sheikh, the piece explores themes of belonging, displacement and the search for self from India to the UK.
Review
The performance of Flight is built around storytelling that is very direct, movement and voice work rather than large scale staging. With simple props and a few pieces of set the world is created around us through the skills of the performer. He is an accomplished and skilled actor, charismatic and endearing with a wonderful, magical storytelling voice. We are drawn immediately into the world of a young boy growing up in outback India, with less than perfect parents, and a life ahead that involves moving to the slums and dangers of the city before reaching an age where a university in the UK North calls him and he finds himself more than out of his depth. Through loss and love, this is the classic hero’s journey and like the true journeys, they are not perfectly formed.
This is a very well delivered and conceived piece of writing, generously offering us a doorway into the life of a person who yearns, wants both the assured safety of a peaceful home in the countryside, but also is open to discovery and the understanding that the young seek for but also the challenges that find them because that is how life is.
Our boy is innocent, open, and his naivety sets him up for difficulty. In most lives at some point or more suffering gives birth to consciousness and both knowledge of life and self, and the difficulties of our story also yield the possibility of insight and also the return back to our roots which are never the same again because we are not the same as we were at the beginning. It is a show full of charm.
I think this performance would benefit from a little bit more simplicity, and sometimes props feel superfluous because this is an able performer who can create things with his hands, and even his voice. At one point he was lying on the floor, and then suddenly he was up and I still was holding the memory of him being there on the floor and wondered if there were two actors on stage. That is deftness and versatility! But the unneeded complexity means that over twenty characters are packed into under an hour and that creates a little bit of plot confusion and narrative uncertainty. So much is crammed in that sometimes the voice of the writers and intentions of the director are a little too prominent in what we behold. Less will be more with some considered but not necessarily major acts of dramaturgy.
For a piece of direct theatre-based storytelling, rich in mood and atmosphere, I recommend you see Flight.
