If You Had Wings

Angharad Matthews brings If You Had Wings to Volcano Theatre from Thursday 29 to Saturday 31 October, the final performance of The Shape of Things to Come 2026. It's a new piece of theatre, written and staged by Matthews, and it's the last one in a season that's been running all year.

To understand why it's a new piece, it helps to know the series it comes from. The Shape of Things to Come is the fifth year of Volcano's freelance commission series, which launched back in 2022 as Solo Duets for the Future. The whole point of the series is to give performers space to try out new ways of working and to make things that look forward rather than back: each artist gets a fortnight to create a brand-new original piece from scratch, and then they perform it over three days, with the show kept under 45 minutes. So If You Had Wings isn't something that's been touring for months; it was made specifically for this slot.

Matthews herself is a theatre maker, designer and performer, and she wrote and staged the piece after nearly a decade in Berlin. While she was there, she studied devised theatre and performance practices at LISPA — now Arthaus Berlin — under Thomas Prattki, who was the pedagogical director of the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris. That background in devised work, where a piece is built through practical exploration rather than just a finished script, sits right in the middle of what the commission series is about.

The performance takes place in The Window, a former shop-floor space on Swansea High Street that's more often used as an art gallery than a theatre, so it's a bit of a different setting from the main house. There are five shows over the three days: Thursday 29 October at 6pm; Friday 30 October at 6pm and 8pm; and Saturday 31 October at 3pm and 5pm. Each one is under 45 minutes, so it's a relatively short commitment.