If all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players, those with disabilities may find themselves working behind the scenes. Due to the history of stigma towards neurodiversity, it is unsurprising that, according to Shakespeare’s analogy, I suffered with stage fright for years. I would only venture out from behind the curtain once I’d donned my mask and utilised performance techniques of a practitioner more famous than Stanislavsky or Brecht: Neurotypical People. Unfortunately, acting was not a sustainable profession for me so I retired in my early twenties and began being true to myself, like Polonius suggested. While I appreciate the Bard, not least for providing material on which I based this entire paragraph, he certainly contributed to the insensitive portrayals of disability in the theatre.
From using epilepsy to portray characters such as Othello as uncontrollable, to relying on blindness and immobility for a cheap laugh in Henry VI, Shakespeare was not ahead of his time as some scholars suggest, but rather a victim of it. In a similar manner to ancient Greek theatre depicting disabilities as curses from the Gods, Bill was writing characters his audience would respond to – namely caricatures of mental and physical illness. Yet expecting Shakespeare to pen an accurate, nuanced and respectful description of disability when the world didn’t even recognise the relationship between disease and handwashing until 150 years after his death is surely unfair. What’s done is done, as Lady Macbeth said.
Regrettably, though, it is still being done today. With the level of understanding of disability writers, directors and actors could have if they so much as opened TikTok, there is no excuse for poor portrayals of differences in the 21st century. Although I loved The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, I was disappointed that Mark Haddon, who wrote the book on which the play is based, did “more research about the London Underground than [he] did about Asperger’s syndrome”, which the protagonist is diagnosed with. Despite this, the play received seven Olivier Awards during its premiere run, including Best Leading Actor for neurotypical Luke Treadaway. Two years later, Bradley Cooper – AKA People’s Sexiest Man Alive – was nominated for a Tony for his portrayal of Joseph Merrick in The Elephant Man. Now, I don’t want makeup artists to go out of a job or anything, but surely – surely – there must have been an actor with a visible difference available to play the role.
However, a perk of the theatre is that actors need to possess a certain level of talent in order to perform live eight times a week, meaning that I believed both Treadaway and Cooper’s portrayals. I did not, however, buy Maddie Ziegler’s performance in Music, which made Shakespeare’s writing seem pared down and sensitive. Deciding who should be able to play a disabled role is a contentious topic, with some arguing that only those with the same diagnosis as the character should be cast. Speaking to The Guardian, playwright Katie O’Reilly, who has a visual and physical disability, lamented the lack of “good parts for people who are different, whose bodies don’t conform” and the fact that oftentimes “they’re not performed by disabled people”. She serves to overcome this with writing that avoids metaphors or tropes, such as the play In Water I’m Weightless.
However, others believe that only casting disabled actors to play disabled characters suggests every person with said disability behaves or looks the same. As someone with autism, I would be horrified if someone chose me to play a non-verbal character with ASD Level Three over Dame Judi Dench simply because we have the same diagnosis. Of course there needs to be a much greater number of opportunities for disabled actors, but those shouldn’t be limited to playing disabled characters. After all, we have years of experience with masking.