Side effects: an analysis of Mind the Gap's Boo and the reception of theatre involving learning disabled actors

Abstract

This article analyses Mind the Gap's Boo, a re-imagining of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, which features a cast of learning disabled actors. It is concerned with the public reception of the work, particularly the ‘effect’ of an all-disabled cast. What are the consequences, both ethical and aesthetic, for these actors to tell this story on stage in front of a public audience? When and how are they ‘on stage’ and how might this be subtly different from seeing or meeting them ‘off stage’? The article engages in the critical response to Boo. Its provocation is this: that theatre involving learning disabled actors involves the aesthetics not just of uncertainty but of anxiety; and that while perhaps a majority of spectators, disabled and non-disabled alike, are likely to embrace this work, some may find it difficult to accept a learning disabled actor on stage. Such theatre produces ‘side effects’ – unintended and perhaps uncomfortable consequences. These side effects, if understood, can lead to important insights into the meaning of disability in performance.

Keywords:

• theatre
• performance
• learning disability
• adaptation

Notes

1. See Schechner (1985, 110) for a discussion of the ‘not’/‘not not’ dynamic in play and performance.

2. See Heddon and Milling (2006, 223) for conclusions regarding levels of democratic decision making in devised theatre.

3. Dyer uses fiction and extended metaphor to explore the personal and aesthetic qualities of eight musicians. It is an act of ‘imaginative criticism’ that blurs the boundaries between fiction and aesthetic analysis. In regard to Art Pepper he is also ‘writing over’ Pepper's own startlingly confessional autobiography, Straight Life. Dyer's blurring of real and performed identity re-enforces the peculiar tone of Pepper's own book: it is as if Pepper is voicing his own life through an actor (Jimmy Cagney or Frank Sinatra); so that what appears to be ‘straight talking’ is actually pathological elaboration. Pepper may only be able to access himself via the self-made mythic representation of his life.

4. For a discussion of ‘intentionality’ in a slightly different context, see review of Rita Marcalo's Involuntary Dances by Jo Verrent: http://www.disabilityartsonline.org/?location_id=1110.