What the **** is Normal? // Francesca Martinez

Although this was the second time I’d seen Francesca Martinez, her show was still my highlight of Normal? 2018. Francesca’s experiences of school and life beyond mirrors my own. She describes how school ground the confidence out of her and how bullying, by both pupils and teachers, affected her mental and physical health, and then describes how she found a way out of the course that had seemingly been set for her.

Her description of her life draws empathy rather than sympathy. 

She doesn’t want to be patted on the head and told 'Poor little thing'. She totally rejects the description of herself as ‘disabled’, preferring instead to call herself 'wobbly'. The stories she tells are laugh-out-loud funny, but she is also a campaigner and educator, addressing school children to give them the confidence that she was robbed of. Martinez points out that society deliberately makes us feel inferior, or, as she puts it: 'Society breeds self-loathing'. Many of us can remember being told, during our teenage years, that ‘how we look is not important’. But, of course, at that stage of our lives, how we look can seem to be the most important thing in the world.

Martinez’s show emphasizes :

‘Don’t fear difference’

‘Being different is important’

‘Only care what you think of yourself’

‘Life is too short to be spent doing something that you hate’

- Keven Blake

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Francesca Martinez - Russell Howard's Good News (YouTube)

A Wobbly Girl's Battle Against the Last Taboo - The Independent

Martinez and the WOW Welfare Bill - Disability News Service

Francesca Martinez on Woman's Hour - BBC Radio 4

Not I // Touretteshero

Jess Thom’s performance of Samuel Beckett’s Not I breaks down not only the text through the interjections of ‘biscuit’ throughout, but the sense that this modernist monologue must be enjoyed by a soberly pensive audience that then talk about it afterwards. Here the audience are introduced and welcomed by Thom, who outlines the parameters of the project and introduces those not familiar with her Tourette’s Syndrome to its manifestation and impact on her performance. The integrated BSL of Charmaine Wombwell is a constant visual score to everything that occurs. There is preparation and a welcome before the performance. After we’re settled, we sit in the dark where we feel the performer raised into position eight feet above the stage, and listen to the rustle of the hood that obscures all but her mouth in accordance with Beckett’s stage instructions. Thom delivers the rapid text clearly and powerfully, as strong a performance and as necessary as any other.

This performance of Not I reclaims Mouth (the central character within the monologue) as a disabled figure, one that Thom states she found instantly familiar. As Mouth narrates the rising tide of words that bursts from her, Thom discusses how it reflects her own experience as someone with Tourette’s. After performing the abstract and oblique monologue, Thom comes back down and sits with us, asking our opinions and answering any questions that we might have about the text or her performance. It’s an intensely open performance of an often-impenetrable text, one that takes it down off some imaginary pedestal and asks its audience to chat about how it can speak to us today. Whilst there has been some pushback recently against the renovation and repurposing of ‘classic’ dramatic texts, exemplified by the firing of Emma Rice from the Globe and the statements of David Hare, Touretteshero’s version of Not I reasserts the value of rethinking new contexts for great writing. Continual reinvention is always preferable to staid orthodoxy.

-       Lewis Church

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Not I - Touretteshero

Not I Audience Information (BAC) 

Jess Thom on Not I - Guardian

Emma Rice Bows Out as Artistic Director of The Globe – New York Times

An Open Letter to David Hare – Exeunt

Wretched // Richard Stott

Richard Stott’s stand-up show documents his experiences as an actor with a disability. Born with Poland syndrome, a condition that resulted in an underdevelopment of his hand and chest, he recounts his experience of existing in an awkward position between identifying as disabled and not due to his ‘non-conformist left hand’. Re-enacting the misguided attention of casting agents and directors, his jokes orbit the fallibility of arbitrary labels, and the grim irony of his position. Once told that he was too young to play Richard III, it was nevertheless acceptable for a marginally older actor to adopt a clawed hand in the role. One incongruity with the character’s body as written was acceptable, whilst the other was not.

Stott’s performance traces the shifting attitudes to disability through the prism of the experience of a performer, from the Ancient Greece through the Victorian era to his own today. Drawing on a memory from a holiday in Athens, Stott asks what his potential as an actor in the Theatre of Dionysus might have been. He asks if he would have been able to perform, or thrown from the rocks in the distance as an ‘imperfect’ specimen. Or would he have participated in the Victorian freak show, making money from his difference? Is it better to hide his disability or engage with it?

The question of disabled actors and disabled roles is one that periodically emerges in high-profile public debate. Eddie Redmayne, Daniel Day Lewis, Tom Hanks and Sam Clafin have all engaged in this ‘disability drag’, as Roger Ebert once put it, to extended protest and debate. The ‘shortcut to an Oscar’ route for playing disabled characters is a cliché, and is now at least questioned when it emerges. The other side of this coin, the stereotyping of the disabled actors, within the work they are able to secure, is equally problematic. The pressure to resist poorly written characters that correspond to a disability is a dilemma within an ultra-competitive casting climate, where any work is to be treasured. Those who manage to negotiate this, are few and far between. Even disabled actors at the peak of their fame still face this difficult negotiation, as Peter Dinklage has attested to. Diversity quotas are a blunt instrument, and as Stott observes, it is one that often leaves actors like him, with a disability but not particularly disabled, in the moral dilemma of grasping the opportunity or denying the work.

-       Lewis Church

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Wretched - Richard Stott

Actor Has Fingers Replaced With Toes – Huffington Post

Poland Syndrome - Genetics Home Reference

Disability Drag - Roger Ebert

Peter Dinklage on Choosing Roles Carefully - The Talks

SPOONFACE STEINBURG // Top Right Theatre

Spoonface knows that people in operas die beautifully and she wants to die beautifully too. Diagnosed with autism, and later terminal cancer, the child walks along silver linings in this hour-long monologue. Tackling the difficulties of development disabilities and terminal illness, Spoonface’s optimism never falters, as the backing track of Puccini’s ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ lulls us into a romantic view of death.

More than 1 in 100 people in the UK live with autism, and they often have difficulty communicating and reading emotions. Because of this, Spoonface’s language is simple. Linear trains of thought are very clearly laid out, in order to prevent the world from being overwhelming.

In the periphery of Spoonface’s monologue is recognition of the difficulty of caring for an autistic child and how that is part of the reason for her parents’ split. While the common claim that 80% of autism families divorce was found to be false in a recent study, having an autistic child without doubt puts extra pressure on a couple. David Mitchell writes about telling people his child’s diagnosis. ‘The replies come quickly but read awkwardly: condolences are inappropriate in the absence of a corpse, and there aren't any So Sorry Your Offspring Has Turned Out Autistic e-cards.’

Named after her unusually rotund face, Spoonface tells us about her short life. Lee Hall, most famous for Billy Elliot, wrote this monologue for radio in 1997 but here Sasha Brooks performs as Spoonface in pyjamas, radiating innocence and vulnerability. Though covering desperately sad topics, this monologue tries to be optimistic, picking up on the positive parts of this life dotted with misfortune. Spoonface values her individuality, saying, ‘to be different is to be who you are’. Mitchell, too, is sympathetic to this idea, noting that gradually you discover that each child with autism ‘possesses its own singular beauty, its own life-enriching experiences.’

- KW

Spoonface Steinburg played at theSpace @ Jury's Inn through August 27 - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/spoonface-steinberg

Information about autism http://www.autism.org.uk/about/what-is/asd.aspx##Prevalence

A review of the original radio play http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/dont-be-afraid-of-spoonface-1165152.html

Autism spectrum disorder http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/autistic-spectrum-disorder/pages/introduction.aspx

Autism’s effect on a family http://www.aamft.org/members/familytherapyresources/articles/08_FTM_3_18_22.pdf

Divorce rates of parents with autistic children http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/children/7926161/Parents-of-autistic-children-more-likely-to-divorce.html

David Mitchell: Learning to live with my son’s autism https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jun/29/david-mitchell-my-sons-autism

FINDERS KEEPERS // Hot Coals Theatre

Finders Keepers is a devised play using mime-based physical performance and puppetry to convey the story of a motherless girl who lives with her dad, and one day finds an abandoned baby that the pair care for together until its real mother returns to claim it. The production is loosely based on the story of Moses, and the final moments show the child's foster mother leaving home, perhaps to follow and become the baby's nanny.  

Within the story material, described by the company as 'a live cartoon', the show hints at issues around care and loss without explicitly interrogating them (we see moments: the ritual of kissing an absent mother's portrait, different situations involving saying goodbye to a child, the adoption of a stranger to the family).

Finders Keepers is is billed as 'accessible to deaf and hearing audiences in a shared experience', and isperformed by two women, one of whom hears, one who is partially deaf. It has been directed by Caroline Parker MBE, who grew up deaf in a hearing household, and we we are shown a world where significant sounds happen as part of the storytelling. The feature that distinguishes deaf audiences from Deaf ones is that they identify themselves as belonging within a majority hearing culture.

There are utterances whose meaning is not always reflected in visual portrayal; trumpet playing and headphones used as devices to soothe the baby; plot shifts in the story marked with pre-recorded soundtrack noises - most prominently the infant's cries, which the characters repeatedly hear and respond to.

During the periods of the show where the baby is crying, a string of lanterns above the set flicker. An extra layer of semiotic interpretation can translate that visual signifier to the understood fiction of a distressed child, by watching the ensuing responses of the cast onstage and extrapolating through repetition, or through familiarity with flashing and/or vibrating baby monitors for parents with hearing impairment.

Whilst we may all share the same theatrical environment, deaf, Deaf or Hearing audience members will receive differently nuanced versions of the story, as with lived experience.

- KK

Finders Keepers is on at 11:45 at ZOO until August 27th. Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/finders-keepers

On making theatre for D/deaf and hearing audiences: https://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/2015/may/12/staging-theatre-deaf-hearing-audiences

On the differences between being deaf and Deaf: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/opinion/d_or_d_whos_deaf_and_whos_deaf.shtml

Resource of information for Deaf parents and professionals working with Deaf parents: http://www.deafparent.org.uk

Organisation dedicated to enriching the experience of CODAs (Children of Deaf Adults): http://www.coda-international.org

Collection of lectures on affectional bonds: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Y1ifjsdRGjsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Making+and+Breaking+of+Affectional+Bonds&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiemKj7rr_OAhUmLMAKHWUYCSMQ6AEIJDAB#v=onepage&q=The%20Making%20and%20Breaking%20of%20Affectional%20Bonds&f=false

TRACING GRACE // OffTheWallTheatreCo

Sixteen people are diagnosed with encephalitis – severe brain inflammation – every day in the UK, yet most of the public have never heard of it. Based on the real life experiences of writer and director Annie Eves, whose sister Grace was diagnosed with the condition at just three weeks old, Tracing Grace aims to open our eyes to the existence of encephalitis and the challenges of living with its long-term impact.
 
Making such a personal piece about such a serious but poorly-understood condition is a brave move, and the production has benefited from the input of Dr Ava Easton, CEO of the Encephalitis Society. As explained at the beginning of the show, the cause of encephalitis is unknown, although it’s related to infection in the body. Its effects are equally mysterious and unpredictable. In the case of Grace, who we follow from childhood through to her current age of 18, it’s described as a “headache that never stops”, punctuated by distressing fits and angry, screaming outbursts. Her family – mum, dad and Annie, portrayed both as a child and an adult – bear it all with loving fortitude, even when things turn ugly and violent.
 
We witness Grace’s towering fury at not having exactly the right sandwich filling (Laughing Cow cheese spread and jam), and her frustration at being unable to understand why she isn’t like other kids. We also meet Annie’s well-meaning but daffy social worker, nicknamed Mental Gentle, highlighting how support for families can fall woefully short in the face of such difficult circumstances. Yet despite the life-threatening fits and the increasing challenges of caring for Grace as she grows into adulthood, the play ends with a family decision to keep her at home rather than sending her into residential care. I cannot help but wish them all well for the future, whatever that looks like.

- KA

The current run of Tracing Grace at Paradise in the Vault has now finished.  https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/tracing-grace
 
More information and support is available from the Encephalitis Society: http://www.encephalitis.info/

Q &A with writer and director Annie Eves: http://www.encephalitis.info/awareness/tracinggrace/

Brain on Fire – a Naked Scientists podcast focusing on brain inflammation: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/podcasts/show/20150324/

THE INEVITABLE HEARTBREAK OF GAVIN PLIMSOLE // SharkLegs

Few body parts are more engaged with (both literally and metaphorically), in theatre and literature, as the heart, and The Inevitable Heartbreak of Gavin Plimsole joins a healthy tradition of artwork in which heartbreak informs a medical heart condition, and in which a medical heart condition informs the story of a heartbreak. In TIHOGP, the audience follows Plimsole’s diagnosis of a serious heart condition caused from malformation, and follows him through informing friends and family, confronting the big questions of ‘Why Me?’ and confronting the uncomfortable reality that no one (not even a young man) is invincible.

The innovation with SharkLegs’ production however, expands both the metaphoric and literal questions of fate and our beating hearts, done by asking audience members to don a heart monitor, the readings of which are projected in the performance space, and which affect – Choose Your Own Adventure-like – the choices of the central character. While Plimsole’s central purpose is to ask audiences to confront their own mortality and their own sense of carpe diem (understood as both a point of inspiration and exasperation), he also thoughtfully shares his reality as a man with a chronic heart condition needing to make constant potentially-life-altering decisions about foods to eat/avoid and activities to do/avoid. For those who develop chronic conditions, the transition from an invincible body to one negotiating limitations can be challenging, as evidenced by Plimsole’s quite legitimate anger/conversations with God/attempts to reconcile past relationship. Reflecting on my own experience of writing about my illness many years ago, which I did in a series called BALL & Other Funny Stories About Cancer, I am quite moved by Plimsole’s honest anger and frustration on display.

By inviting the ever-changing heartbeats of the audience into the space as an essential set piece, The Inevitable Heartbreak of Gavin Plimsole asks audiences to reflect on the diversity of life and experience and how, despite us drinking energizing Redbulls or calming chamomile, our hearts and brains are still quite unpredictable – and this is a reality as horrifyingly frightening as it might be deliriously freeing. (BL)

The Inevitable Heartbreak of Gavin Plimsole is on at 13.40 at Pleasance Dome until August 29th (not 16th). Venue is wheelchair accessible, hearing loop available - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/inevitable-heartbreak-of-gavin-plimsole

A few other projects on hearts, heartbeats and heartbreak:

Sheila Ghelani’s Covet Me Care for Me: http://www.sheilaghelani.co.uk/covet-me-care-for-me/

Ira Brand’s Keine Angst: http://www.irabrand.co.uk/?works=keine-angst

Marina Tsartsara and Miriam King’s work: http://marinatsartsara.weebly.com/blog

On Hubbub – A Wellcome Trust funded project, run by an interdisciplinary team looking at work, rest, noise, tumult: https://wellcome.ac.uk/press-release/exploration-rest-and-busyness-announced-first-project-hub-wellcome-collection

On Waiting for Diagnosis – Fuel’s While You Wait Series: http://www.fueltheatre.com/projects/while-you-wait

PEOPLE OF THE EYE // Deaf and Hearing Ensemble

Deaf and Hearing Ensemble’s first major Fringe production – The People of the Eye – is an exploration of the development of a deaf identity from a number of different perspectives: from a deaf child learning to deal with microaggressions, to a hearing sister’s struggle to understand how difference might affect a person’s access to opportunities, to a hearing mother struggling with the reality that their child will need to live in a world in which there are challenges.

By focusing on the perspective of a child growing up in a hearing world, it might be easy to dismiss the ignorant comments faced by the central characters as the ignorance of childhood bullies, but Deaf and Hearing Ensemble’s focus is sharp: although such idiocy from strangers towards children, of course, does exist, the microaggressions, the stupid things that are said, are not limited to child perpetrators. They use humour to make their point, but their look at the chasm between hearing and deaf culture is a sharp rebuke of the ‘kindness’ and ‘goodness’ enacted by so many hearing adults.

People of the Eye is an origin story – a look at how the identity of a deaf adult might be built through a personal medical history, family interaction, and their peer group over time – and the incorporation of family videos demonstrates a strong and moving desire to understand one’s past (and thus, one’s present). But the political is never far away – much like in Nina Raines’ 2010 play, Tribes, People of the Eye shows that brief moment where a doctor convinces a parent not to teach their child sign language, referencing their chances of being ‘normal’ as improved by lip reading. While Deaf and Hearing Ensemble drop the comment lightly, it – combined with thoughtful performances in BSL and English, and a good chunk of light ribbing at audience members’ ignorance of BSL – resonates deeply. As with Touretteshero’s Backstage in Biscuitland which you cannot watch without wanting every show in the future to be a relaxed performance – one leaves People of the Eye understanding not only how much they really should learn BSL (or even basic BSL) but about the culture difference which can possibly be breached with a bit of effort on the part of hearing adults. (BL)

People of the Eye is on at 13.00 at Northern Stage at Summerhall until 27th August (not 10th, 17th, 24th). Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Closed Caption, BSL - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/people-of-the-eye

Francesca Ramsey on Microaggressions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPRA4g-3yEk

Touretteshero, Backstage in Biscuitland: http://www.touretteshero.com/2014/03/19/backstage-in-biscuit-land/

Nina Raines’ Tribes reviewed in The Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/8078475/Tribes-Royal-Court-review.html

ADLER & GIBB // Tim Crouch and the Royal Court Theatre

Tim Crouch’s play Adler & Gibb looks centrally at society’s obsession with the story behind the story, showing something between an artist’s journey to understand her character and an invasive, even violent, emotional grave robbery. An actor, Louise, and her acting coach have come to the Grey-Gardens-inspired home of famed and reclusive artists Adler and Gibb, only to find the circumstances of their reclusion to be different then suspected. Louise is relentless – reminiscent of the portrayal of Capote in Miller’s 2006 film, waiting impatiently for his subject’s death to finish In Cold Blood – and a clear archetype for our obsession with celebrities (even hip, arty, off-kilter celebrities) and the expectations for all people to fully explain their comings and goings to just about everyone.

In his classic essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), Barthes wrote about the problems inherent in allowing a writer’s autobiography to dictate how a piece of work is received by its audience. Such a practice exists today – we retrospectively diagnose Vincent Van Gogh or Chopin with any sort of mental health disorder, see Abraham Lincoln’s homosexuality in his policy decisions, we reread all of David Bowie’s final album as, exclusively, an extended pre-death ritual. Although such a practice might normalize different experiences through history – thus making new role models for us – there is also a danger in the disempowering idea that certain illnesses, lives, problems and struggles automatically lead to any number of specific outcomes. This is put into sharp relief in Adler & Gibb when Louise’s presumptions about the lives of her role models are discovered as wildly inaccurate.

 *Spoiler Alert. The following contains a spoiler for those yet to see the show, but the following is The Sick of the Fringe part*

When Louise realizes that her hero was not in fact in an abusive, reclusive relationship and, instead, someone slowly dying (perhaps of early-onset dementia, it’s not quite clear), the play resonates with the recent – and unexpected – deaths of David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Victoria Wood. But it is not only celebrities who sometimes crave privacy after the diagnosis of an illness; society’s inability to deal with bereavement, disability and difference in public space may make the withdrawal from public life by those dealing with illness themselves even more justified. The view that illness is something that one should be ashamed of, or the view that illness is something which burdens others, is individualistic and, in fact, ableist in its construction. While we don’t need to force Adler to share her illness with the public, we wish she would have known that we would support her however she needed. But then, of course, society has to do that work of not being ableist dicks…. And this might be a long time coming.  (BL)

Adler & Gibb, by Tim Crouch, 3-27 August (not 8, 15, 22), Summerhall, BSL interpreted shows available - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/adler-gibb

In Theory – ‘The Death of the Author’ - https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/jan/13/death-of-the-author

Dr. Richard Kogan – Rachmaninoff and His Psychiatry - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM097N2lNEI

On Capote and In Cold Blood - http://ocbookshoppe.com/blog/the-legacy-of-truman-capote/

David Bowie’s Death Is A Reminder of the Sanctity of a Private Life - http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/01/david-bowies-dignified-death-is-a-reminder-of-the-sanctity-of-private-life/

RSA Animates: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Smile or Die - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo