MYTH 1

“There aren’t that many people out there with learning disabilities so what’s the big deal? You can’t represent everyone in a theatre space and we don’t all need to see ourselves on stage do we? “

TRUTH 1

One in ten people in the UK have a learning disability, or are related to someone with a learning disability, or work with someone with a learning disability. That’s a big percentage. For these people and characters not to be seen on stage is odd, unrepresentative, and means an audience misses out on some great talent and great stories.

MYTH 2

“Employing actors with learning disabilities is just too costly, they need support so it’s two people for the price of one before you’ve even started, no production budget can cope with that.”

TRUTH 2

There are companies out there who train and assist professional actors with learning disabilities in theatres, film and sound studios including Mind the Gap, Hijinx, Dark Horse and Access All Areas. They have a full understanding of the support needs of their actors and are experienced in finding ways to cost effectively enable people to work with equality and to offer employers and colleagues tips and information on how to make the process work for everyone’s benefit. In the UK subsidised sector there are ways of accessing funding to cover support costs, where needed; some actors with learning disabilities are able to work autonomously or with slight adjustments.

MYTH 3

“Actors with learning disabilities can do Elvis impressions and join in with stuff and be quirky and have a good time which is great,  but I’m not going to be able to direct them into a show without being really horrible to them and stifling that authenticity and making demands. It’s better that they do their community thing and we keep what we do over here. I’m a nice person, I don’t want to be accused of being mean.”

TRUTH 3

Professional actors with learning disabilities, and there are increasing numbers of them out there in the industry, expect to be challenged and tested in the same way as any other actor, most have trained and relish the standard collaborative pressures that drive any rehearsal room where a cast is working to scene and play objectives. If actors are non professional, untrained community performers then naturally different expectations apply so at the casting stage being sure of an actors’ skill level will indicate the ability of any individual to engage with the process.  Being mean doesn’t come into it unless you are usually considered mean in which case who’d want to work with you anyway you tyrant? Adult professional actors with learning disabilities put themselves out there like anybody else.

MYTH 4

(Related to 3) “Actors with learning disabilities are angels. I’d just want to hug them all day and it would make me so tearful.”

TRUTH 4

Actors with learning disabilities are not angels. They’re actors like other actors.  They have good days and bad days especially when engaged to a difficult artistic process. All actors are sometimes truly horrible and sometimes a hoot and may not take kindly to uninvited hugging. And stop crying you big baby.

MYTH 5

“Casting a learning disabled actor means a really REALLY looooong rehearsal period.”

TRUTH 5

This used to be the case, the expectation being that people with learning disabilities could only acquire and retain a performance by working very slowly. Advances in formal training, expectation level and action research with processes (I’ve rehearsed a two hour long main stage integrated show in two weeks with no difficulties at all experienced by the leading actor with Downs’ Syndrome) mean this excuse not to employ just doesn’t hold water. Top flight actors with learning disabilities are prepared for speedy work by their companies and working quickly, and with minimum down time, can actually assist with role development; it encourages other cast members to work at pace too, which is never a bad thing.

 

MYTH 6

“Actors with learning disabilities can’t play characters, only themselves.”

TRUTH 6

An actor with a learning disability is only ever going to play a character with a learning disability but why does that mean he/she can’t play someone with a learning disability who is different from them? Many of the best in the field do just this,  actively working on the differences between themselves and this person they’re playing in a story. Many accomplished actors with learning disabilities have trained and have technique, some working through Stanislavskian method and/or Laban and physical transformation. The key is preparation and this may happen pre rehearsal process but it certainly happens and there are no limits to the extremes of character people with learning disabilities can play, and want to play- like any other actor.

MYTH 7

“There aren’t any parts for actors with learning disabilities.”

TRUTH 7

Is a bit like saying there aren’t any parts for women who are five foot one and a half with brown eyes. A bit of imagination applied to casting choices in soaps, serial drama, classic plays, Shakespeare and new work and wow what an extraordinary new landscape would open up when audiences come to a theatre. It’s all in the casting and risks taken by directors and writers but the experience could be extraordinary. Think of your favourite classic play and then think of the character list. Now cast an actor with a learning disability as one of those characters and think about the impact and resonance of their presence through the narrative…See what I mean?

MYTH 8

“Audiences don’t want to see ‘real’ people with learning disabilities on stages, it’s too challenging, better to have non learning disabled actors playing those parts.”

TRUTH 8

Not better, simply unacceptable given vocational actors learning disabilities are available for work. Where new roles are written in a way which is considered ‘too complex’ for someone with a learning disability to deliver, then writers and directors have a responsibility to re-draft or adapt with an actor with a learning disability in mind. Expertise is out there to draw on and there’s no excuse at all for this kind of casting choice in 2016.

MYTH 9

“Actors with learning disabilities are unpredictable, they could do anything on stage.”

TRUTH 9

In my experience actors with learning disabilities tend to be the most solid and reliable members of casts during rehearsals and out on the road. While colleagues have run the gamut of extremes of behaviour and on stage off piste excesses actors with learning disabilities have been consistent and rock solid. Interestingly a dry or fluffed prop moment from an actor with a learning disability can be a cause for amplified alarm from other cast members and I’ve been secretly delighted when its sometimes happened ‘accidentally on purpose.’

MYTH 10

‘There aren’t any actors with learning disabilities out there.”

TRUTH 10

There are, there are quite a few of them actually and many of them are very good indeed and benefit from finely tuned training and exceptional back up from teams of experts.

Find them, take the risk and move your work on to new territory.

You won’t regret it.

(No theatre professionals were harmed in the making of this blog but many were directly quoted).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As producer for this research and development phase of A MAN WITH DOWNS SYNDROME TALKS ABOUT LOVE AND TELLS A STORY, working to a schedule, budget, and outcomes agreed with funders Arts Council England I am my own Chief Executive, Marketing department and Outreach Director.

Lines of communication are clear and in spite of occasional altercations with an internal 70’s throw back with ‘time and motion‘ written on her overall all areas of operation click along fairly smoothly.

This isn’t the first project I’ve produced by any means and I’ve ridden many large and small headed monsters when in post as Artistic Director at Dark Horse and in other past roles but it is complex in terms of new relationships and developing audiences all over the UK, and, fundamentally, working with a new play.

“My play.“

The writer coughs. Apologetically.

Not that she should. But she knows what a precarious position the writer can sometimes find herself in where ethical processes aren’t followed (As can the designer, composer and the rest of the creative team) in a theatre collaboration.

Increasingly playwrights, where they have the skillset, fulfil an ‘Independent producer writer director’ role, the hat I’m currently wearing, in Arts Council funded research and development processes, and beyond.

The reasons for this are many but are in part due to a reduction in financial support for literary departments in theatres with a new writing remit;  where once there was a Literary Manager and budget for new work development now there’s a nudge towards project/play specific funding for individual writers via the Arts Councils Grants for the Arts scheme.

For me, as someone who has produced and written my own work before, this provides a fluid movement from original idea (The writers voice, script, play and vision) to other voices (Creative team) to production (Solo or with others, co-production, and the retention of control over vision that allows).

Producing my own written work, not to mention being a theatre committee member of the Writers Guild of Great Britain,  makes me I hope very aware of the creative inputs of others and the risks of ‘artistic material theft’ or the erroneous assumption of ownership.

Where processes are devised completely different sets of rules apply (Though the editors and writers of these pieces of work also deserve acknowledgement for the highly skilled job they do).

A MAN WITH DOWNS SYNDROME TALKS ABOUT LOVE AND TELLS A STORY is a major collaboration with a big team of exceptional creatives, ethical company partners and co-producers and venues, developing their work and ideas through a vehicle, which is very much a play, written by me, the writer.

The original and first hat.

Worn with pride. No apology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a world without difference the following will apply…

1. All babies will reach the same stage of development at the same time.  All babies will say their first words at the same time, eat the same food as every other baby and experience the same experiences.
2. All children will exist within set intelligence parameters and all bodies will be more or less uniform with small fluctuations in height and weight.  
3. All teenagers will listen to the same music, experiment with the same drugs, have sex with the same category of partner, get angry at the same things, wear the same clothes and take and pass and fail the same exams.
4. All adults will look more or less the same and have the same relationships with the same people as everyone else.
5. All workers will do the same jobs in the same way.
6. All holidays will be the same as the last holiday and the next holiday and be in the same place.
7. All language and accents and sentences will have the same structure and sound.
8. All plays books films and pieces of music will be the same.
9. All roads and houses and cars and items of clothing and wallpaper and objects will be identical to other roads houses cars and items of clothing and wallpaper and objects.
10. All opinions about everything will be exactly the same.

There will be no…

Creativity, spontaneity, wonder, questioning, challenge, joy, debate, interest, comedy, knowledge, uniqueness, learning, progress or

point.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Ben Langford

2. Sarah Gordy

3. Gareth Clark

4. Anna Gray

5. Tommy Jessop

6. Anna Marie Heslop

7. Liam Bairstow

8. Imogen Roberts

9. Rebekah Hill

10. Joe Sproulle

 

Research draft written the next few days are all about shaping the development work ahead and listening to, and playing with, the ideas of all collaborators, in order to push the work forwards, into the sun.

Schedules are in place for the event days at the New Wolsey Ipswich, York Theatre Royal and the Lowry in Salford, now it’s a case of working out how best to fill in the detail and how best to use the limited time.

At each event participants are coming from all over the UK to work with the creative team and the Dark Horse ensemble to add their voices to the score (we want this production to include as much input as possible from people with Downs’ Syndrome and other learning disabilities).

Theatre companies including DIY, Hubbub, Razed Roof and the Freewheelers will be attending and joining in with the work and we’re looking at three busy days filled with movement, sound and exploration of story.

The creative team have the development script, the shape. Their work is beginning. Their explorations in sound, movement, set and costume and character are what the next stage in the process is all about, moving words from page to stage, an enormous amount of energy is about to be released.

Composer and Sound designer Loz Kaye will focus on the soundscape, developing the story through what the audience will hear, complementing and counterpointing the narrative, recording soundbites, working with participants and team to find a musical framework and work with an explosion of sound on each event day.

Designer Pip Leckenby will look at the places in the story, inside and outside worlds, the objects that people use and the clothes that they wear so that imagined environments can begin to be constructed, Pip will make it real.

Movement Director Ita O’Brien will explore the physicality of the characters, their relationship to the world and to each other and work with team and participants to explore storytelling, character, place and state through the body.

Actor Tessa Parr will work with the team and the other actors to explore the character of SAMANTHA, questioning her intentions and working through her journey, finding flaws, making discoveries and developing the relationship between her character and that of her on stage brother, CLARENCE.

Joe Sproulle, THE MAN, Toby Meredith, CLARENCE and Rebekah Hill, BABY will work with team and participants to develop their characters, improvising and engaging with games and exercises to explore their characters journeys through the play.

Their colleagues from the Dark Horse ensemble will work through the whole process too, inputting ideas and shaping a crucial backbone to the work.

Alongside this fantastic creative team venues, partners and a few invited guests will be a big part of the three days too, having a stake in the development of a piece of work which aims to engage and have relevance for audiences across the U.K.

Here we go…

 

 

 

A Man with Downs Syndrome talks about Love and Tells a Story is a piece of narrative drama.

This much I know now that the first draft, the research and development blueprint, lies on the desk, approximately 1.5 cm deep and weighing in at the equivalent of two packets of biscuits, rather than floating about in the ether, a formless, weightless promise.

There’s a story, a plot, characters, conflict and a resolution.

Its the start of something, a shape to enable the deeper digging to begin. The rough spade work before the team comes in to fully excavate.

First drafts, for me, are a pleasure and a pain, a battle with inner whispers that the idea’s a bad ‘un and a real difficulty on concentrating on one thing solely for such a long time.

Well, a week, but thats a long time inside your own head, in the company of the demons that whisper ‘you know nothing and what’s a schmuck like you doing thinking you can write a play?’

Soon the neurotic playwright will disappear and won’t be seen or heard during the research and development phase when the director takes over.

She’ll receive her notes and a gentle nudge towards a workable draft in the wake of everyone’s findings through the events coming up.

However, before the director takes over a small observation by the playwright who read an article last week by Lyn Gardner  (Guardian theatre critic) re: a production of a new play featuring a character with autism, surprisingly played (I believe) by a non-autistic actor. Lyn made her usual well formed critique of the drama and also expressed a wish for work written by playwrights with autism to be seen on stages, suggesting that this kind of authorial integrity can only add value to the work.

Food for thought.

Whilst a totally valid ambition for equality of representation in the theatre making crafts it potentially calls into question the role of the playwright as someone who absorbs, filters and through ‘wroughting’ the emotion and ideas of others into action crafts the start of a piece of theatre.

To suggest that only people with direct experience of a state of being can write about that state discounts most of the work of most playwrights dead and alive.

An emphasis on a ‘real’ voice for fictional work featuring actors with learning disabilities, for the sake of not being accused of cultural appropriation, could result in segregation from the wider industry.

These are interesting times for theatre featuring the talents of actors with learning disabilities. Mind the Gap has this week premiered new work MIA,  devised from the direct experience of people with learning disabilities, Access All Areas is working with direct experience in its new MADHOUSE project and Hijinx’s MEET FRED, a collaboration with Blind Summit theatre uses biographical material from its’ actors to directly feed into an allegorical piece about the learning disability life experience.

A cruratorial/editorial role is taken by the director/dramaturg and devised material is formed into an audience facing piece of ‘real’ theatre.

This form is now so much the norm for work featuring actors with learning disabilities that the work I’ve written, as a non disabled playwright, for actors with learning disabilities, a team of non learning disabled creatives and a general audience feels revolutionary.

Verbatim and biographical forms are most potent when directly exploring issues rather than themes.

Drama wrought from research and experience and then hewn from a writers imagination offers something else for audiences. It offers the opportunity to absorb paint splattered on a huge canvas, to explore worlds and characters utterly and joyously non-authentic, to see characters being and doing what they authentically simply cannot be and really shouldn’t do, to make a leap beyond the real into fiction and story, to feel imagined places, bigger, more flawed, more dramatic, to experience the past, the present or an imagined future and to ride on the thrilling dips and troughs of a dramatists imagination as it tantalises, surprises and throws questions out into the world.

For actors to collaborate with a playwright and develop work through narrative drama takes craft.

Actors with learning disabilities can master this craft too, as the outputs of the excellent Dark Horse theatre demonstrates. Work on new writing processes opens doors into the broader profession and access into a world where skills beyond devising are required.  All working TV and theatre actors need some technique to work with scripts and given narrative and its very evident when these skills aren’t in place.

The vanguard of acting talent with learning disability breaking through and working in high profile productions need to demonstrate these abilities for the sake of keeping the door open for those coming up behind.

Its too easy for producers to find excuses not to employ, the same skills as everyone else rather than an isolated way of working will progress the equality agenda in theatre and lead to more integrated work.

We narrative proponents are currently extremely niche, which is just fine, being different is a very good thing…

As is the freedom for any writer to write about anything and for any actor to play any character they can…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Its almost time to write the play.

The play.

The outcome, not the research.

The distilled stuff that comes out of the barrel through the tap at the bottom.

Just a little longer to consider message, form, space and time before throwing the darn thing onto the wheel and shaping it into existence.

A line of dialogue arrived two days ago, while writing marketing copy.

I needed to encapsulate the central friction which will drive the drama.

A soundbite to sum up the dilema and argument at the centre of the play.

“Who cares if I’m your sister? This is the human race. And you’ve come last.”

Intolerance, injustice, inequality, skewed values, isolationism, fragmentation, prejudice, blame and misplaced pride encapsulated in the central relationship between Samantha and Clarence, a way into the ‘big/little’ of a play aiming to resonate beyond its’ plot into an analogous context.

Almost time to write the play for me means I can almost see it

I can see who is on stage and where they are and how they move. There are four characters. There is big sister Samantha and Clarence and their relationship and the charged air between them.

There is also Clarence in his room and Baby as he creates her and spends time with her and falls in love with her.

There are two Clarences, one who talks to us and one who just is.

I sketched out the dynamic between Mum (who has died) and Clarence and his sister Samantha in the cafe bar at Hampstead theatre while waiting to meet movement director Ita O’Brien and trying to find ways to explain what I have so far.

 

I want to see some of the objects

But I can’t quite reach them yet.

These are the objects in the suitcase which Clarence brings with him from his mums’ cottage and which identify her as a woman whose movement through adult life has taken place over the course of the last seven decades.

I know who she is, I need to know what objects she would identity through.

I’ll start in her kitchen.

And then stop thinking about it, if it’s not ready to reveal itself it’s not ready, if it’s not there it’s not there, I can wait and let the plot work its magic in the writing. I’ll trust that it’ll come.

I can feel the spaces the characters move in.

Clarence is used to space above his head and round him, in the garden and on the moors around his mothers cottage.

Moving to Samantha’s confining plastic covered apartment high above the city is a shock.

Clarence hates heights.

The balcony is terrifying but Clarence has to brave in order to grow his plants.

If both Clarence and Samantha look at the sky they’re OK but they can’t ever look down.

 

Next I need to write the arc of the story.

This is almost too final and everything in me is resisting it but its also very exciting.

I will either write it in synopsis or short story form.

It will change.

But it will be a start.

Of the play.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The last post was written on a tiny island looking out towards Europe and the future.

Todays post is written on a tiny island looking inwards and backwards.

Didactics and polemics have never been colours in my playwriting palette; I’ve used allusion, allegory and lessons from history to explore an area of current relevance as in Poor Mrs Pepys (unfettered capitalism) and Hypothermia (fascisms’ consequences).

Prior to the events of the past fortnight I had as much clarity as its possible to have about the areas of exploration for the next play, the next outing into a theatre space where human dynamics are played out in front of a group of people, bad decisions experienced, rotten outcomes shared and challenged in a created context.

Post recent events and a collective inability to recognise the difference between hypothesis and fact, between drama and reality, or to grasp the concept of consequence, for which all instruments of the state, the media and we who created them are responsible; the ‘burn’ the ‘idea’ the ‘blood and guts’ of a play, this next piece, is forming in a febrile, yet fixedly static, cauldron.

Racism, xenophobia, punitive economic policy, bigotry and delusions about an empirical past are evident areas ripe for post Brexit dramatic dissection;  confusion, deceit, fear, identity and loss of faith offer broader stretches of dilemma in which to swim but the role of the playwright, to offer options, ideas and routes into alternative futures as a consequence of present concerns is a challenge when its a known that a nominally democratic decision has stuffed us all up.

Pointing at something and saying its wrong will never do,  unless the other hand points at a better choice. No one currently wants to put either hand up.

Shame upon shame and stasis again.

Form perhaps needs to fit the tenor of the times and verbatim theatre may continue to engage in ever more powerful ways in a divided context.

The efficacy of the medium faced scrutiny from chair David Edgar and a large roomful of playwrights in the capital yesterday through a panel discussion courtesy of London Writers Week and the Writers Guild. Alecky Blythe, Robin Soans and Gillian Slovo gave insights into their process. While thrilling to the whirring of scores of creative brains and the benediction of Lyn Gardners‘ presence philosophical questions dropped into this writers head ‘Presenting the current societal schism on stage in verbatim form, good idea or bad? Is it possible to explore a seemingly unanswerable and enormous issue in this way? Do I have the courage of these extraordinary writers to pick at sores and thrust a voice recorder into angry faces? 

And who is it for of course.

Whose mind are we currently seeking to change through demonstrating the division and the issue? 48/52 equals split down the middle.  Just who is ‘the audience’ today and what do they want or perhaps more importantly need to think and feel right now?

In order for catharsis and renewal to begin the question needs an answer.

Watching the Threepenny Opera in the Olivier this week, there to see the excellent Jamie Beddard give a phenomenal landmark performance on a main stage, some audience seated around me had an unusual muted quality, a collective stifled guffaw only occasionally edgily released, like a fart during the new vicars sermon.

Brecht for my money can offer a cop out by virtue of alienation, the distance providing comfortable space over which to judge before moving on swiftly, untouched, to chateaubriand and armagnac.

At one point in the action the audience came alive, the bottle unstopped.

Post interval Rory Kinnear, playing Macheath, broke the wall, sardonically suggesting that this wasn’t the show to watch if being cheered up was the aim, a statement which raised laughter, a ripple of release across the circle. His second, half in character, half out of character josh/jibe (dependent on stay/remain stance) suggesting that in the post Brexit world/world of the play ‘you’ll be alright as long as you’ve got cash, lots of cash’ met immediate disquiet, the cork flew back in, and buttocks remained, generally, firmly clenched for the duration.

A fine Rufus Norris production was well received to solid applause and pockets of whooping delivered by a strangely jumpy audience.

Tolerance, respect for culture, the development of workers and human rights and progress in equality for people with disabilities are European traits, not English ones. Partnership with Europe has offered evolution and we can thank social progress in northern european countries for much cultural advancement.

In the age of fragmentation and this current political vacuum its vital that work featuring minorities, the disenfranchised, the disadvantaged, the voiceless and the easily disregarded continues to be seen and specifically to be seen by broad audiences, including decision-makers, the wealthy and the cushioned, audiences currently embarrassed and uncertain but who nonetheless will come to theatres to chew over anxieties and increasingly toy with possibilities.

Dramatic fare served up on stages in the months ahead needs to represent everyone and offer an affirmation of tolerance and the value of all human experience, ideals that may be lost in the separation.

There’s a responsibility, now more than ever, to pull a humanistic sensibility from a bruised British public.

Perhaps that’s the place to start from.

 

 

 

 

 

Wow.

What an amazing process the early development of I LOVE YOU BABY has been.

The super-objective was to explore process and audience engagement for an innovative piece of work which will play out to crossover audiences on the middle scale.

A new play embracing digital technology, diverse audiences, major roles for actors with Downs Syndrome and the exploration of a new rehearsal room methodology which means every actor (whatever their differences) can work with equality.

A full development draft was written of a 2 hour long, 3 act, comedy (which luckily did make people laugh and want to know what happens next).  Outreach workshops were modelled and delivered to dozens of people where learning the dance and singing the song proved big hits.

A day and a half’s rehearsal resulted in 50 minutes of off book up on its feet (seat of pants but flying) performance by a total of 7 terrific actors.  Two scratch performances played to mixed, critical and appreciative houses in the round at the Stephen Joseph Theatre and at the Lowry.

The mini residency at the Stephen Joseph Theatre was immersive, dynamic and terrifically exciting. This piece of film gives an impression of the work to that point and that first performance process:

Creative team members designer Pip Leckenby, digital projection designer Mic Pool and composer Loz Kaye filled audiences in on their ideas to bring the eventual production to life and cast logged their impressions of the work and process below:

https://vimeo.com/145741318

Thousands of views, hits, likes and digital engagements were had across the globe for this blog, films, attendant posts, native content and its satellites and interest in the work continues to grow.

The possibilities for next steps in the works’ development, both real and virtual are many and interesting, and all involve working in new ways with many different kinds of artists and people to engage people in a human story and eventually to a theatrical event.

I’m taking a breather to assimilate the learnings and this blog will be back in the New Year when the next stage in the journey will begin.

In the meantime many thanks the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Chris Monks, Cheryl Govan and the Outreach department, Matt Eames at the Lowry, all actors engaged to this process, the creative team and especially to Lynda Hornsby, Dark Horse theatre and the ensemble for being fantastic project partners and an exceptional company to work with.

Thank you Arts Council for the Grants for the Arts funding which allowed this project to happen and to the Peggy Ramsay Foundation for the support of the writing process (Its a frustrating fact that playwrights have to shut the door and sit still for a period of time in order to be able to produce work).

The project was a huge success and enforces the need and desire for full representation of learning disabled characters and actors on stages across the UK.

This work is important, inspiring for everyone who comes into contact with it and is where tomorrows theatre needs to be.

See you there with I Love You Baby.

It’s only just begun.