An air hostess is a baffling concept when you think about her. Archetypally, she is a symbol of glamour: sliding through the airport terminal with purpose and ease, clacking her heels on the marble floors and wafting a cloud of perfume in her wake. She’s a pin-up figure who’s also trained to be a first responder in a crisis: making you feel comfortable in a situation that could (theoretically) injure you, and is contributing (however incrementally) to the devastation of the planet. She makes the unsafe feel safe.
This is an idea that we, as a company, NONSTOP, have been transfixed by whilst making our
hyper-drive theatrical experience, Pigs Fly Easy Ryan, which you can attend (if you dare) at The Pleasance Theatre in London next week. It’s a heady, horny exploration of our relationship to air travel and ecology, which gets up close and personal with feelings of dread, denial, and downright confusion about climate collapse.
Behold the most ridiculous plot since Dude, Where’s My Car? MAYAHEE and MAYAHOE are two pigs who meet in a pigsty; MAYAHEE arrives mysteriously, explaining that she is a micro pig with big dreams of becoming a flight attendant. MAYAHOE is immediately besotted by the new arrival and forgoes their contentment as a farm-pig to venture where no pig has gone before in the name of love. So ensues a ridiculous porcine masquerade as the pair stowaway onto a flight, only to discover that their sky-jolly has consequences for the earth and their mortality.
The show is a headlong experiment in staging existential terror and also celebrating our existence on this mortal coil. It’s a silly, slippery riot of consumption, getting high and stomaching the comedown, on a stage that becomes overpowered by plastic, sweat, baby oil and inflatables. It’s a love story for the end of the world – because nothing gets us hornier than when our lives are in danger.
We’re in the middle of an AI boom, where water supplies are dwindling at the mercy of powering ChatGPT. ‘Green solutions’ we hear from governments and business leaders have felt like putting lipstick on a pig. Wrapping our heads around the vast and unthinkable climate catastrophe is no easy feat. For us, it’s an exercise where blame gets passed around and pinned in complex cycles, until you dissociate and move on to thinking about something else more manageable. It isn’t linear and it isn’t simple – neither does our pig-airhostess show claim to be.
If you’re looking for a show which leaves you with a clear sense of what your responsibilities are in getting out of the climate crisis we find ourselves in, this is not the show for you. This is a visceral and very smoothed brain response to the current moment, getting down and dirty in the absurdity of hyper-capitalism whilst sitting with the deep existential dread that is the byproduct of the way we are living. It is fun, it is sweaty, and it is not fit for human consumption. Will you ride with us?
Pigs Fly Easy Ryan is playing at The Pleasance Theatre (Main House) 9pm, 15 -17 April 2026.
Tickets from £12
NONSTOP is a brand-new company that creates sweaty, hedonistic theatre shows that cross borders, boundaries, and binaries. The company is made up of Trevor White (he/they), Lou Doyle (they/them), Kendra Miller (they/them) and Leela Gaunt Vilette (she/her).
