---

• Written by
  Charlotte Jones

Book Tickets

Overview

Swimming in synchronicity, gasping for the air of freedom

Two women incarcerated for breaking society’s harsh rules.

Discarded and forgotten for half a century.

Together treading water, creating an imagined world in which Doris Day provides solace and hope.

This dark comedy is set in the England after the First World War, and is inspired by the lives of two women, Miss Kitson and Miss Baker, who were each in locked away in a hospital for the “criminally insane”, one for wishing to dress like a man and the other for bearing an illegitimate child. United by circumstance, they were not released until the 1970s. The fluid timeline flows between the harsh linear world of the hospital and a world of their imagination.  By turns funny, chilling and moving, Airswimming reminds us of the cruelly treated, forgotten women of these generations.

“The structure and writing – admirably clear and unsentimental – both trip the light fantastic, effortlessly gliding from the desperately funny to the desperately sad” Guardian

Written by multi-award winning playwright Charlotte Jones.