Company for deaf and disabled talent breaks down the barriers
Signs are good as champions of diversity head north to present Blood Wedding
and are now regarded as one of the best purveyors, not just of disabled theatre, but of all theatre. Much of this is down to Sealey, an artistic force of nature who has been profoundly deaf since she was seven years old.
Graeae were last in Dundee with Sealey’s production of Reasons To Be Cheerful, a musical inspired by the work of Ian Dury, who had been struck down with polio as a child, and whose song Spasticus Autisticus was banned by the BBC. Sealey had earlier collaborated with the Suspect Culture company on the play Static, and her production of Blood Wedding is being co-produced by Graeae, Dundee Rep and Derby Theatre.
Given this context, the young lovers’ words mouthed by Mitchell and Conachan about each other’s bodies is given fresh resonance, especially as Mitchell is a non-disabled actor of colour, while Conachan is disabled.
“We had a development week early on,” says Sealey, “and as it happened the woman playing the mother was deaf, and I started to realise that the relationship between a deaf mother whose son is her main form of signing contact, to lose him is even more profound. She’s already lost her other son and her husband to murder, and now she’s losing her son who is alive, but she’s losing her communication asset, so that moved things to another level.
“Sometimes Graeae makes a choice to refer to people’s physicalities and impairments,” Sealey says, “and sometimes it really doesn’t, but because the deafness of the mother is so profound in this it felt appropriate that people’s physical differences or ethnicities were mentioned, and that became part of our territory, so there are no elephants in the room.”
This looks set to be the case too in terms of playing style, in which signing and audio-description are woven into Ireland’s script, which relocates the heat and dust of Lorca’s play to the sticky claustrophobia of a city. The former is a methodology which Sealey has applied to other Graeae works, ever since she directed Steven Berkoff’s version of The Fall Of The House Of Usher with the numerous stage directions being spoken by the actors.
“Maybe it has become a signature thing,” Sealey says, “but with Graeae our work has to be signed and have audio description every night, and with The Fall Of The House Of Usher we hardly had any money and could only afford three actors. I wrote to Steven Berkoff and asked if we could have actors say his stage directions. That was when we realised the theatricality and sense of ownership in doing that.”
Ownership is something that came to the fore during Sealey’s tenure as co-artistic director of the much lauded London 2012 Paralympic opening ceremony. While this spectacular event saw disabled artists move into the mainstream like never before, Sealey has found what has happened since a frustrating experience.
“For my team of 50 professionals who took part in the opening ceremony, I thought the world would be their oyster,” Sealey says, “but the only people who rang up months later were Channel 4, asking if any of them wanted to be on their programme, The Undateables.”
Sealey recalls several audience members at Graeae’s production of The Threepenny Opera who said that if they’d realised it was being performed by disabled actors they probably wouldn’t have gone to see it. Even closer to home was the language used by head-hunters who had approached Sealey with a view to her applying for the then vacant post as artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland.
“The head-hunter asked me whether I would want to continue to audition deaf and disabled people and why, and was Scotland ready to see deaf and disabled people on stage.”
Given the success of companies such as Birds Of Paradise, with whom Amy Conachan recently appeared in hit show The Wendy Hoose, and learning disabilitybased company Lung Ha’s, the question was a strange one. Especially given that only a few years ago Theatre Workshop in Edinburgh instigated Europe’s first fully integrated theatre company that featured a semipermanent ensemble of disabled actors. Sealey withdrew her application anyway.
Despite such setbacks, things have moved on for Graeae and other disabled artists. The fact theatres such as Dundee Rep and Derby are co-producing Blood Wedding is itself a statement.
“There’s been a real shift in the word diversity,” Sealey says, “and deaf and disabled people are part of that. It’s not solely about ethnicity. So theatres have really started taking it seriously, but there’s still a long way to go. The last two years have been an uphill struggle, and that was why doing a play like The Threepenny Opera was so important now.” Blood Wedding is at Dundee Rep, March 4-14 and Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, April 1-3; Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, April 8-11. www.dundeerep.co.uk who visits the capital on March 5 to talk about his first novel in 10 years, The Buried Giant.
His seven previous books have been translated into over 40 languages. The event is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre at 5.15pm. www.lyceum.org.uk/whats-on
a‘ I sked Steven Berkoff if we could have actors say his stage directions. That was when we realised the sense of theatricality and ownership in doing that