I can’t remember when I first heard about Connor Sparrowhawk and his dreadful death. I remember meeting his mother, Sara Ryan, at a disability event sometime in 2015 and watching the #justiceforLB campaign develop on social media and in the press and did the little I could to support it. But, to my shame, it wasn’t until I read her brilliant book ‘Justice for Laughing Boy’ in 2018 that I really started to understand what had happened and why it mattered so much.
In some ways the story felt personal. My second son Joey is just a year younger than Connor, and, like Connor, has learning disabilities and epilepsy. Like Connor he needs help with certain things. And like Connor he generates enormous joy in his family and friends, and laughter and love surround him wherever he goes.
But there the similarities end. Because what happened to the 18-year-old Connor is that he was taken from his family home and plunged into a hell that is almost impossible to comprehend.
Slade House in Oxford (now thankfully closed) was what is known as an Assessment and Treatment Unit, one of the deeply dysfunctional NHS institutions set up to help (mostly) autistic people whose care has broken down and who could benefit from a short and focussed intervention.
The dreadful fact is, however, that these places are not fit for purpose, and people are often locked away in them for months, years even, largely forgotten about, except by their desperate families who do whatever they can to get them out.
Connor spent 107 miserable and lonely days in Slade House: no proper assessment was made, no treatment was offered, his freedoms were restricted, visits were controlled and finally, despite repeated warnings, he was left unattended in a bath where he drowned while having an epileptic seizure.
This was ten years ago: 4 July 2013.
In the face of the family’s unimaginable grief, a growing campaign for justice was created, not just to establish Southern Health’s (frequently denied) responsibility for this entirely avoidable death of a healthy young man, but to expose the many cases of neglect, cruelty and abuse which is still so often the experience of people in a wide range of medical, educational and residential institutions.
This homegrown campaign was a model of its kind, drawing together people of good will from many different backgrounds and skills, who found themselves confronted by an appalling culture of corporate buck passing, dead-eyed denial and the vilest kind of victim blaming.
But eventually, the world took notice.
And so, a few years ago, and armed with Sara Ryan’s brilliant book, I set out to dramatise the story for the stage: not just to tell audiences about what happened to Connor and his family, but to help them understand the challenges faced by so many people with learning disabilities and their families today.
It was a strange feeling trying to give dramatic shape to a group of people who are—with one tragic exception—very much still with us. I was determined to respect their experiences and allow audiences to feel something of their grief, their rage, and their determination to create a better world. But, of course, I knew it also had to be a vivid drama. Striking the right balance was hard.
Fortunately I had two things on my side.
The first was Sara Ryan’s book which tells us so much about the everyday life of Connor and his family. She lets us in in a way which is honest, revealing and, as with all the best writing, rich with contradiction. She offers an overwhelmingly powerful and detailed account of what led up to her son’s death and even intersperses the book with brief imaginary dialogues with Connor which I have been able to transfer almost verbatim. She also explains (and celebrates) how the #justiceforLB campaign emerged and achieved so much in the face of bureaucratic obfuscation and the massed ranks of well-paid chief executives and their expensive lawyers.
I was also grateful to have Sara’s unwavering support for the project and have been constantly touched by her willingness to check my factual errors, correct my misunderstandings, and prompt me to be better, bolder, and braver. I would readily understand if she felt she couldn’t face revisiting the pain, but I think she knows that one of the best ways of working for the rights and dignities of people with learning disabilities today is to show just how badly things can go wrong.
Adapting a story like this for the stage is quite a challenge: scores of people were involved and the action took place in dozens of different locations, but I hope I’ve found a way of presenting it economically, vividly and with a clear sense of purpose. Time will tell.
Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, or perhaps I’m just the right person for the job, but I’m delighted to be directing the play too. Certainly, in writing it I imagined exactly what the production might look and sound like. No doubt a brilliant cast and production team will make me think again: constructively, creatively and collaboratively.
It took time to find a theatre that was prepared to invest the money, resource and reputation to stage it, reflecting perhaps the low profile that people with learning disabilities enjoy even in—especially in, perhaps—establishment circles. It says something that it is the unsubsidised commercial theatre that has taken it to heart, and I’m grateful, touched, and moved that Stella Powell-Jones and David Doyle at the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre is presenting it in April and May in coproduction with Danny Moar at the Theatre Royal Bath, and then, hopefully, on tour in Spring 2024.
Inevitably I feel a real responsibility to honour Connor’s memory in the best way I can: his family, his friends and everyone who was involved in the campaign deserve no less. This is precious cargo and I’d better not mess it up.
But ‘Justice for Laughing Boy’ is no dusty memoir: it is a living, breathing campaign which has achieved so much. But there is still so much to do if people like Joey are to be granted the fundamental human rights and dignities that Connor was so brutally denied.
For the dreadful fact is that the approximately one and half million people across the country who have some level of learning disability are still forgotten, neglected and mistreated. The culture of appalling negligence and evasion described in ‘Justice for Laughing Boy’ is everywhere to be seen, and Connor Sparrowhawk wasn’t the first young person to die in an institution supposedly set up to help, and tragically won’t be the last.
In 2017 I wrote a play called ‘All Our Children’ about the Nazi persecution of disabled children which was staged at Jermyn Street. Tragically ‘Laughing Boy’ is its dreadful and logical sequel.
A change has to come. Maybe this play can, in some small way, help to make a difference.
Tickets for ‘Laughing Boy’ are available at https://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/show/laughing-boy/