I turned our FAMILY drama into a PLAY
MOST of us would shy away from our family lives being laid bare in front of an audience. But one aspiring playwright has taken a story of disability in her family and turned it into a play which will appear in Dublin’s Fringe Festival. The only problem is, her dad hasn’t seen it.
Anna Shiels McNamee is the eldest child of John, a working physiotherapist who is blind due to a genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa. And as an actress who was looking to create more work for herself, Anna felt her home life was the place to start.
‘I had heard a producer saying previously that people want to see inside a world that they can’t get to, like the world of the mob in The Sopranos and inside the White House in The West Wing.
‘And it just got me thinking that people might want to know what it’s like to be blind.’
Her father’s blindness had never been regarded as unusual in the family setting.
‘I have never known any different so my dad being blind has always just kind of been a nuisance to us in the house,’ Anna says. ‘I thought I could bring an interesting and irreverent take to it all, starting with all the weird stuff that happened to us as a family.’
And so My Dad’s Blind was born although Anna began writing the play by stealth at first.
‘I recorded my dad talking without him knowing,’ Anna reveals.
‘It wasn’t very ethical but I knew if I told him I was recording him, he would start to monitor what he said and be more careful. So I recorded him, wrote it and then read it to my family.
‘They were fine with it but it was an early draft and a lot has changed so they could come to the show and be horribly offended as it’s dark enough. But I think they will be fine with it all.’
Among the adventures Anna draws on is the story of probably the unluckiest guide dog ever.
‘We got our first guide dog and he had a stroke,’ she says. ‘And then he got epilepsy so we would be walking down the street with the guide dog and he would start having an epileptic fit.
‘We would have to position the dog on his side, hold his head. There was just all this mad stuff I thought I could write about that would be entertaining.’
For his part, Lifford man John is actually very much the proud dad, full of enthusiasm for his daughter’s new project.
‘I am very thrilled that Anna has actually got this play on the stage, I think it is a big achievement,’ he says.
‘What’s in it remains to be seen. I just take the view that this is Anna’s perception of a family as she was growing up and it will be fascinating.
‘When do you, as a parent, get the opportunity to see something written large like that? It is a real privilege.’ John insists that he’s not worried about what might be contained within the acts.
‘The title My Dad’s Blind has given me a good clue,’ he says. ‘I’m sure there won’t be anything there I’m not aware of as the blindness was treated as part of the normal characteristics of the family and of me.
‘It presents great difficulties but I would say my children knocked as much craic out of me being blind as they could manage.
‘I wasn’t precious about it and they certainly weren’t.’