Freaks of History

James MacDonald, Patrick Duggan

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783207350
• eBook ISBN: 9781783207367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Disability studies have long been the domain of medical and pedagogical academics. However, in recent years, the subject has outgrown its clinical origins. In Freaks of History, James MacDonald presents two dramatic explorations of disability within the wider themes of sexuality, gender, foreignness and the Other. Originally directed by Martin Harvey and performed by undergraduate students at the University of Exeter, Wellclose Square and Unsex Me Here analyse cultural marginalization against the backdrop of infamous historical events.

MacDonald, who is cerebral palsied, recognizes that disability narratives are rarely written by and for disabled people. Therefore, his plays, accompanied by critical essays and director's notes, are a welcome addition to the emerging discourse of Crip theory and essential reading for disability students and academics alike.

 

Part I

Critical Essays

My First Playwright

Julian Meyrick

My first school. My first love. My first loss. Life is a barrage of explosive firsts intercalated by phases of regular flow, or ones assumed to be so. What happens in signal moments shapes our view of what happens thereafter. As in a play, the measure of human experience is determined in Act One, which provides, in Aristotelian fashion, the crucial inciting incidents. This is how existence works. We lurch around at one level of understanding until interrupted by something that does not fit into it. We crash headlong and the drama begins. What happens afterwards is up to us.

In 1982, I was a 20-year old undergraduate and would-be theatre director at the same university to which James MacDonald had absconded, he told me, from an incomplete doctoral thesis on the semi-colons in the novels of Henry James. I was thin, callow, narrow, untested. He was ten years older, smart as a whip and supremely affable. He kept boxes of dog-eared books in wooden crates around his room and worked on a typewriter that looked like one of Hemmingway’s discards. My father’s death the year before had opened up for me the world of pain, and I knew a little of what time has in store for everyone, sooner or later. James exampled as a recipient of the gift of physical deficit. We both chain-smoked. And, of course, we both loved theatre. We spent hours analysing the intricacies of plays, performances and theatre companies; tons of fag ash. I don’t remember any beer. And I have wiped from my memory the instant coffee I now regret we ever consumed. Perhaps we drank tea. Mainly we talked. Our drug of choice was conversation, and in the realm of shared ideas there was no puerile youth and no cerebral palsy. There was search and discovery and a great deal of fun to be had.

Towards the end of the academic year James asked me to direct his play Too Many Monkeys. Set in London’s East End, then ungentrified, as inaccessible as any pit town off the rail map, it tells the story of a hapless working class family and their wheel-chaired-bound disabled son. I suppose I would call it now a ‘slice of life naturalism’. Back then I didn’t have any genre categories so it was just ‘a play’, as mysterious as any Heath-Robinson contraption arriving through the post without instructions. I gathered a group of college actors as green and keen as me, and we read it serially, hoping its meaning would spontaneously reveal itself.

Over the summer we did our research and rehearsed. We met up in deep-shadowed London church halls to engage in the religious rite of character improvisation. And we spent a bright, memorable day at Bermondsey market, amidst a sea of then-fashionable pastel-coloured shirts and jumpers. I got lost in a mazy square of low-rise flats, stacked like tins of tuna, buzzing with muscular, shouted life – it was a Saturday; vans coming and going; me, ignored, drinking in the atmosphere. Working class life! This was it! I can’t remember if James came up to London, or if that was another time, another play, a few years later, one I screwed up. I think we were on our own, getting by. James trusted us. And he was right to do so. Our only thought was to do well by him and by the play. Thus was the pattern set in my soul: the playwright as collaborator, confessor, prime creative, friend. It is hard to recover from disaster. But if you are a theatre director you learn the knack or get out of the game. It is impossible to recover from success, the sense of inner assurance you have not only done good but done right. My relationship with James was successful, and 30 years later I am what it made me: a playwright’s director.

I never thought about James’ disability in a critical way. I never used the word ‘disability’ around him or about him. He said to me ‘if I fall over, pick me up; don’t hesitate, just do it’. So I did, at the supermarket, man-handling him like a sack of onions. In Stigma (1963) Erving Goffman meticulously details the social reality that those judged less-than-normal must face, the daily appraisals they must wade through like a bank of mud. Its kindest face – by which I mean the least immediately objectionable – is civil inattention, the means whereby the ‘less’ in the less-than is filtered out of consciousness by the ‘normals’ around them. Thus the height of the dwarf, the status of the divorcee, the sexuality of the homosexual is ignored by way of a consensual temporary amnesia, a collective looking away. Since the 1960s Goffman’s list of stigmas has changed, but I doubt it has gotten any shorter. The number of ‘less thans’ is a structural constant, something a world elevating difference to transcendental significance seems to need. Against this – and born from naivety, not maturity, I readily admit – I decided to treat James as equivalent to myself. I saw no other way. As with Too Many Monkeys I lacked categories of discrimination. And I was spiritually lazy. It seemed the easiest course to take.

Exeter University has a pocket-battleship of a repertory theatre, the Northcott, where for a few lunchtimes we were permitted to stage the play. For reasons of expediency rather than acting ambition, I took the role of the disabled son. He had no dialogue to speak of, just one long speech at the start of the second scene, which I did not trouble to learn, thinking I would pick it up along the way. Rehearsals continued smoothly. James seemed pleased. Posters were mimeographed and stuck up around campus. Our short season got under way.

Then the signal moment arrived, preceded and followed by a procession of smaller illuminations like attendant bridesmaids. It happened like this. I was in the wheelchair, waiting for my soliloquy to begin. Come opening, I still had not memorized my speech – too busy telling other people what to do; not really an actor anyway; thinking of the scene as a bridge to the rest of the play etc. So I wrote it out and put it between my legs, the old dodge. My thinking was to cast my eyes downward, where the audience could not see, and read my lines from the crib. But I had miscalculated the intensity of the stage lights which blinded me and kept me from seeing anything myself. I was stuck like a glued fly. I could not move from the wheelchair without blowing the part. I could not read my lines. And I did not know them. A full auditorium waited. Time loomed, like a stalker. For a moment, I knew what it was like to want to do something but be totally incapable of doing it. For a moment, I knew what it was like to be disabled.

For the neo-Platonic Marxist philosopher, Alain Badiou, the great ontologist of our age, and a playwright himself, playtexts exist in the future anterior. They are objects that will have been played (2008: 211). When they are first written their natures are undisclosed, awaiting completion. They are less texts than pretexts. Performed, they are then revealed for what they are, if not fully – different interpretations always remain possible – then substantively. How many times since 1982 have I waited on this moment, heart in mouth, career in hands, waiting for a playtext to be born, its body in print but its spirit arriving only when the actors are cued to move and speak on its behalf? In drama, nature is everything. Clumsy dialogue, poor structure, clichéd storytelling: none of this matters if the living principle, as the critic Stark Young called it, is clear and extant, ‘the supreme soul and test [of a play], first and last’ (quoted Cardullo 2008: 129). So it was with Too Many Monkeys. Page and stage cohered. A true dramatic experience was had. Only then, like a man walking backwards to a cliff and trying to stop on the edge, did I properly understand the play James had written.

Back in the wheelchair, forcing down panic, I fribbled, as Elizabethan actors termed it, regurgitating half-remembered phrases and stringing them together with cries, grunts and howls. The scene passed. The show was well received, and I hid my shame and vowed to terminate my acting career forthwith. Ever gracious, James said nothing. We had the show to talk about anyway. We picked through our achievement repeatedly but, again, the word ‘disability’ never occurred in any context. How is it possible to stage a play in which disability is the main focus of the action and yet not mention it by name? Too Many Monkeys was a well-written play; a well-acted play; a well-directed play; an interesting, moving, thoughtful, challenging play. Yet the thing that lent meaning and sense to these judgements was never openly broached. Weird; and, in retrospect, profoundly depressing.

Fast-forward three decades and the situation is different yet not so different. The world has little difficulty mentioning the word ‘disability’ now. Indeed, it is profuse in verbal acknowledgements, with this issue as with so many others, as if words by themselves could address the problems they are presumed to identify. And no doubt they do, up to a point. No doubt it is not helpful to civilly inattend as I once did. But talking the talk isn’t walking the walk. The issue is, to what is this acknowledgement conjoined? To use a distinction of Montaigne’s, are we improving our soul’s motion, our wisdom, or are we throwing up a screen of learning that takes us away from the very object we should be labouring to understand?

This quandary foregrounds the epistemological difference between drama and discursive scholarship, a difference not simply in structure method but in value and purpose. It is an old dispute that goes back to Plato’s The Republic where he icily asks – the memory of Aristophanes’ poisonous caricature of Socrates still rankling – whether ‘[playwrights] really know the things that people think they say so well’ (Book X: 375). Aristotle’s Poetics was in part a rebuttal to Platonic scepticism of drama’s worth, but the face-off is a real one and should not be lightly set aside. If plays like Wellclose Square and Unsex Me Her claim to tell us something true, something we did not know before, then the question arises, is this more than an effect in language? And if it is, if these plays, and by extension drama of a like kind (let us not give it a label quite yet), present something we cannot find in another form – in statistics, case studies, surveys, encyclopedias – then how do they do it? In what way are Wellclose Square and Unsex Me Here ‘about’ disability, and how does this transform into new knowledge?

To answer this question, we must hone-in on the moment when a play discloses itself – when pretext becomes text – and observe the two sets of forces operating: those beholden to live performance and those beholden to literary drama. It is in the encounter between these separate worlds, the sum of which is larger than all the contributing factors, that something real is born. The encounter may not be successful. But it is invariably fundamental. Live performance and literary drama are not just different elements, different structures. They are separate ways of being, separate ontologies. In theatre, the attempt to map one type of being onto another may be fruitful but it is always confronting – one reason we take it personally when plays fail, and hunt out the writer and director for accusing looks and resentful comments (of which I have copped my share).

For all the thousands of books we have on acting – going back to the avalanche of manuals that started appearing in the eighteenth century – the job of the live performer remains a deeply mysterious one. It is something easier to understand than fully explain. Whatever adaptive advantage we ascribe to our ability to performatively enter the cognitive space of another human being, the impetus to do so comes from our deepest, non-utilitarian instincts. We do it. We act. Ex post facto we look back on the dark cloud of what we have done, giving reason and shape to our efforts. When we come across terms like ‘Stanislavskian’ or ‘Brechtian’, therefore, we must not imagine a clear-cut taxonomy of theatrical creativity akin to a bus timetable. Anyone who reads Halliwell’s translation of Poetics – and sees that it is less a book than a collection of lecture notes – will appreciate the ambiguity of κάθαρσις (katharsis) as Aristotle presents it (Halliwell 1986). Anyone who then reads Brecht will grasp that his use of the term is instrumental, if not tendentious. Whatever else Brecht may have been, he was no ancient Greek scholar. Nor was his knowledge of twentieth-century realism deep or complete. He was a man in a context, and this context was if not narrow then certainly bounded. We must not fall into the trap of flipping the adjective ‘Brechtian’ around as if it were self-illuminating, foreclosing examination of what it might be referring to. Likewise with ‘Stanislavskian’, that other consummately woolly adjective used to badge efforts across the theatrical gamut from nineteenth-century Moscow to twenty-first-century Hollywood. Without rejecting the terms as meaningless – for they make sense to those who use them and find them of conceptual value – we should look at the reality behind the labels.

In his ‘Director’s Notes’ Martin Harvey says the student actors of Wellclose Square and Unsex Me Here were ‘asked to understand disability from within as well as without’ (27). Without loading this insight with meta-theoretical interpretation, we might imagine a ‘within’ aka Stanislavskian performance dimension that focuses on the emotional terrain of the individual characters, and a ‘without’ aka Brechtian dimension that frames the broader context in which their interiority arises. The first provides what might be called truth-to-moments, the second truth-to-situations, and while they are not as antithetical as common use of the Stanislavskian/Brechtian dyad suggests, they nevertheless operate in different ways, in the rehearsal room and in performance. Both dimensions are on display in Wellclose Square and Unsex Me Here. In fact, it is the braiding of these two approaches that gives the plays their elasticity and shape. A good example of truth-to-moment is Tsilla’s frantic attempt, in Wellclose Square, to find her relatives and some kind of safety after having arrived in London in flight from the Kiev pogroms. Her inability to do so, the rejection she experiences from everyone she meets – save at the hands of the deformed Grisha, a man she cannot bring herself to trust – kick-starts a downward spiral of desperation that runs through the first half of the play like an electric current, culminating in her gruesome murder. Here the performance arc is linear and of a piece. It requires from the actor playing Tsilla a good faith ‘as if’ exploration of the feelings and thoughts of a young Russian girl as she struggles with an inability to speak English, and her own inchoate fear of disability. A similar arc can be found in Unsex Me Here in the character of Andy Mueller, the young male nurse, who, co-opted into a regime of authorized medical killings at Hadamar Psychiatric Hospital, finds himself both victim and victimizer, before opting for an act of revolt ambivalent in its moral valency and impact.

By contrast, the truth-to-situation dimension of the plays emerges when the truth-to-moment one break down and there is disagreement about what is going on. This is most evident in the direct-address commentary provided by Gentleman in Wellclose Square and the trio of narrators, Johanna, Barbara and Claudia, in Unsex Me Here. These commentaries do not neatly fit the drama happening around them, thus creating bubbles of doubt in the narrative flow. Different kinds of evidence ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s Introduction
• Part I: Critical Essays
• Part II: Playtexts
• Back Cover