Hamlet in a wheelchair? It’s about time

By Joyce McMillan
Published on Monday 23 January 2012 14:02

In Dundee, at the end of last week, around 200 people from across the UK gathered to debate the position of artists with disabilities in theatre, dance and performance.

The sponsoring organisations included Creative Scotland, Dundee Rep Theatre, Dundee City Council and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and the theme was “Pathways To The Profession”

Unusually, though, what happened at the conference was not a listing of problems, followed by a painstaking effort to propose some possible solutions. Instead, the event was more like a terrific, upbeat, life-affirming celebration of what artists with disability have been able to achieve, combined with a demand that the people in charge of large arts organisations get themselves up to speed on the subject, and start to recognise what’s going on. The centrepiece event of the two day conference was a performance on Thursday evening at Dundee Rep, featuring acts ranging from Scottish dancer Claire Cunningham’s acclaimed short piece Evolution, to an astonishing solo piece about a deaf torch-song signer (not singer) staged by leading mixed-ability company Graeae.

And the sheer quality of the work on view - searching, humane, passionate, beautiful, often very funny - seemed to mark a kind of tipping point, a moment when the debate about embracing artists with disabilities in “mainstream” performance moves from a “how” phase - or even a “why should we” phase - to one where the only remaining questions are “why not?”, and “why not today?”

The fact is that there is now, in Scotland - and across the UK - a core group of performers with disabilities who are so talented, and so charismatic on stage, than any director with any ambition would want to work with them; and their creative response to whatever sensory of movement limitations they experience tends to enhance the quality and depth of any performance in which they are involved, rather than diminishing it.

So far as theatre is concerned, of course, the main problem lies in the presumption of naturalism, or what you might call “the mimetic fallacy”; that is, that if the script doesn’t say a character is black, or disabled, or whatever, then the actor can’t be, either. As the playwright David Greig pointed out in Dundee, though, naturalism in theatre is always imperfect, and the attempt to achieve it increasingly irrelevant, in terms of theatre’s role in a culture dominated by screen drama. Greig suggests that we should be thinking in terms of creating ensembles of actors which reflect the community around them, including people with disabilities; others point out how quickly disabilities become invisible, or simply taken for granted, when people get to know performers with disabilities, and recognise the other qualities they bring to the work.

So the question is whether we have now reached a point where some director of a mainstream theatre, somewhere, can simply take the bold step forward, and cast an actor with a disability in a major role that doesn’t require any such thing. Because one of the most striking things about the Dundee conference was the extent to which it called into question the mantra that “it takes time”, and that it might be “some years” before people are ready - for example - to accept a Hamlet in a wheelchair.

On the contrary, the experience of performers with disability in the UK now seems to be that a change - in audience attitudes, in organisational capacity, even in physical facilities - can take place almost overnight, once someone in a position of power simply decides to go ahead, and throw the whole weight of his or her artistic judgment and enthusiasm behind the decision.

As always in the arts, of course, the key is in the quality of the work; if the artists are brilliant, then their precise range of abilities becomes secondary to the primal act of communication. And the best story told at Dundee was the one about the artistic director who was dragged along unwillingly to a casting showcase for performers with disabilities, grumbling that he could never employ one. “You bastard!” he said to the organiser afterwards. “I never wanted even one disabled actor. But they were so bloody good that now I’ve got two of them! And now we’re going to have to make it work.....”

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