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Director: Rosaleen McDonagh
Venue: Project Arts Centre
I arrived to the Project Arts Centre with considerably less time to spare than the advised “15 minutes before a performance” and was shown into the downstairs theatre. My first reaction was surprise. Why was I surprised? Because I am used to the Project shows being held upstairs in the larger theatre. It dawned on me that this particular theatre was of course wheelchair accessible, more than can be said for a lot of spaces. I realised just how many people, including myself, take our ease of access to everything completely for granted. This show, as you may have gathered from the above digression, was designed to be accessible. Of the actors, three of them have some form of mobility impairment. The fourth is a well-known member of the travelling community, John Connors (Love Hate).
The connection between all four of these actors is that they have, at some stage in their life, experienced what it is to feel ‘on the edge’ of things.Their characters explore those feelings as the plot unfolds. Eleanor (Ellie) is making a documentary about travellers. She may be a ‘crip’ but she is seen by the rest as unmistakably privileged; she went to mainstream school, she went to university, her parents are wealthy and, crucially, she is not a member of the travelling community. Jack is a traveller. He is also a failed athlete, and the feeling of ‘what could have been…’ hangs around him unmistakably. He lives through this every day, alcohol constituting a large part of his ‘recovery’. This does not bode well for his failing relationship with Mary Anne. The two are on a break, but Mary Anne sees it as more than that. She is a feisty traveller woman in a wheelchair. Jack is her second romance after a mysterious ‘Michael’, who serves as another link between the characters. Eoin is the adopted son of Mary-Anne and Jack, although paradoxically older than both. He is gay, and also very funny, always ready with quips to bring down the self-righteous Ellie; ironically calling her “the only crip in the village” or responding to her romanticised and stereotyped view of “the rich traveller culture” with a reminder of her own: “like the way ‘settled’ people have Riverdance?!” The actor, Donal Toolan, may be recognisable to many from his role in the acclaimed film Inside I’m Dancing (2004), a film which went some way toward bridging the sometimes invisible divide between the able bodied and the not so able bodied.
The term ‘crip’ bandied around so often between the characters in the show can be viewed the same way as the word ‘queer’. It acts as a reclamation of an identity so frequently patronised and looked down upon by many ‘mainstreamers’. The word screams “yes we are different”, but the difference is one that the speaker is proud of. In the words of Mary-Anne: “you can edit my words but you can’t edit my reality.” The show questions the current vogue of ‘assimilation’ and ‘absorption’ of people that may identify proudly as ‘different’. It suggests that the politically correct rhetoric of “we are all the same” is not very useful. This egalitarian logic may in fact deny people their status and the stance they choose to take by saying “we are here, don’t forget it.”
With all this to bear in mind, this show brought a lot to the table. For me, the most important part of its message was the intersectionality of so many categorizations, in particular as seen from a feminist perspective. One memorable quote from Mary-Anne, spoken to Ellie, was: “they’re all talking about the ‘glass ceiling’ and we’re just trying to get through the glass door.” The message is, feminism can so often be restricted to a certain ‘type’ of female.
On a brighter note, whether you conform to this ‘type’ or not, this show certainly passed the Bechdel test and it was truly fantastic: thoughtful, humorous and defiantly different!
