Staging Laughing Boy

Thanks for inviting me to speak today. I’m a great fan of the Cultural Inclusion movement and as someone who’s been working in the theatre for 40 years, and who’s the dad of a young man with severe learning disabilities, I hope I have something to offer. 

I want to talk about my stage adaptation earlier this year of Sara Ryan’s book Justice for Laughing Boy, the account of the death in an NHS Unit of her son, the 18-year-old Connor Sparrowhawk, and the fight for justice that ensued. It was one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever done and, I think, offers useful insights into the cultural representations of learning disabilities and disability injustice.

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 great joy in his family and friends, and laughter and love surround him wherever he goes.

Joey makes us all laugh.  Connor’s nickname was ‘Laughing Boy’.

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 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 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 eleven 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 responsibility for this entirely avoidable death, 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. 

The campaign was a model of its kind, drawing together people 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’s brilliant book, I set out to dramatise the story for the stage: not just to tell audiences about what happened, but help them understand the challenges faced by so many people with learning disabilities and their families today.

It was strange 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 tears of grief, tears of rage, but also their determination to create a better world.

But I also knew it had to be a vivid drama and striking the right balance was hard.  

Fortunately I had two things on my side.

The first was Sara’s book. She lets us in in a way which is honest, revealing and, as with the best writing, rich with contradiction. She offers an overwhelmingly powerful account of what led up to her son’s death and even intersperses the book with brief imaginary dialogues with Connor, which I transferred almost verbatim.

Although the actors playing Sara (Janie Dee) and Connor (Alfie Friedman) didn’t double everyone else (Forbes Masson, Charlie Ives, Lee Braithwaite, Daniel Rainsford and Molly Osborne) played a huge range of parts, but continually returned to the family unit.  There was no scenery (just a curved white wall, a wooden floor and four chairs: thank you, Simon Higlett) or costume changes, locations were suggested by projections (not just of places, but logos, text etc, from the brilliant Matt Powell) and occasional sound effects (Holly Khan) and lighting (Ben Ormerod), and much was played directly to the audience. The pace was fast and energetic, funny and sharp, to reflect the wildness and disorientation of the whole experience

Connor was onstage all the time, watching and commenting, even though much of the action unfolded after he had died.  As you can see from this photograph, my favourite photograph of the show, he loved London buses.

In writing and staging Laughing Boy I had two clear objectives.

The first was to show that far from being an oddball, Connor was a young man like any other. There was hardly any reference to his learning disabilities or autism, and I avoided all those tropes about special powers. What I wanted to do instead was to ensure that the figure traditionally regarded as strange was seen as entirely human, part of a family, part of the community in which he lived.

I also wanted to show that the incredible campaign that emerged after his death was driven by the most of ordinary of questions: why had this happened and what made it possible?  

But I also wanted to show that the world around him, the world that was supposedly set up to help him, to provide support when things were difficult, and to be transparent when things went wrong, was incompetent, dishonest, self-regarding and downright peculiar.    

And so what became clear to me was that Laughing Boy was a perfect example of what Bertolt Brecht called ‘the alienation effect’. This is the aesthetic form which encourages the audience to look at the world from a fresh perspective: to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. This allowed us to rehumanize the person who had been dehumanized and provoke questions about the people and systems who we assume are there to help: and that, I’m afraid, in this case includes the NHS, in particular Southern Health Trust.

The alienation effect draws attention to the theatre’s artifice. But by doing so it also reminds the audience that the real world is out there and that engaging with the real world matters.  Let me give you two examples, one small, one much more significant. 

At the top of the show, as the audience were coming in, the actors milled around on stage, talking to the audience, taking selfies, just being real before it started. Anyway on the first preview Forbes who played Rich, Connor’s stepdad, saw the real Rich was in the auditorium, and went over to him, shook him by the hand and jokingly apologized that he was playing him in his native Scottish accent. It was a weirdly important moment, because it signalled to Rich and Sara and everyone who saw it that Forbes knew there was something more important than his performance in a play, namely real life itself. But, paradoxically, by directing our attention to the reality of Connor’s family and the story of what had happened, the artistic event became more significant, not less.

A more important example of the alienation effect was the moment late on in the play when Sara explains to Connor that he’s not the only learning-disabled young person to die in NHS care of neglect and worse. Suddenly a huge projection of 18 faces came up. ‘All’, as Sara says in the play, ‘with the full range of humanity and gorgeousness. All dead. All ghosts. Beautiful startling ghosts.’

In some ways it was the most powerful moment in the show. Its raw reality took the audience’s breath away. It led us away from the cosy comforts of a little London theatre to the reason why the play was happening.  By refusing fiction for a moment, we understood the nature of injustice more vividly. 

One proof of what we achieved was the fact that at the end of the 90-minute show, many people in the audience didn’t want to leave the theatre and sat there, some in tears, some talking to each other, some just staring into space, all trying to understand how it is possible that such injustice is possible 

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 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 won’t be the last.

In 2017 I wrote a play called All Our Children about the Nazi persecution of disabled children which was also staged at the brilliantly principled Jermyn Street Theatre. Tragically Laughing Boy was its dreadful and logical sequel.

A change has to come. Maybe this play can, in some small way, help to make a difference.

Timothy West (1934-2024)

Tim’s death has hit me hard.

He was a friend and a mentor and, I realize, over a period of fifteen years, I directed him in five different productions. This was only a small part of his huge and varied career, but it affected my life in all kinds of ways and, I think, I hope, brought out the best in him. 

The first time I directed Tim was in 1997 when I persuaded him to play Falstaff in both parts of Shakespeare’s mighty epic Henry IV for ETT. He led a terrific company of actors, including Gary Waldhorn as the King, the venerable Joseph O’Connor as Justice Shallow, Paterson Joseph as a very hot Hotspur and, most memorably, his son Sam as Hal: a fine white wine, someone joked, to his father’s full-bodied red.

Unlike some leading actors, Tim had no compunction about playing Falstaff as a bit of a bastard. Thus, while he revelled in Falstaff’s appetites and allowed us to revel in them too, he understood that these were paid for by others, from the long-suffering hostess, Mistress Quickly (Mary MacLeod), and the young prostitute Doll Tearsheet (Lucy Briers), to the poverty-stricken peasants Falstaff corruptly recruits to fight for the king: ‘Food for powder, food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as good as better’, as he puts it so cynically.

Indeed this political realism, this refusal to see character in simplistic terms, gave Tim’s Falstaff a magnificent three-dimensionality. Audiences laughed one moment, and were appalled the next, but all the time his acting was rooted in the stuff of everyday life. Indeed, my assistant director, Mick Gordon, noticed that while Sam’s script was extensively annotated with dozens of carefully thought-out comments, a page of Tim’s had the simple instruction: ‘Put on boot’. The physical, the everyday was never far away in his approach to acting, and all the better for being so.  

A couple of years later, Tim played the deeply flawed Solness in my production of Ibsen’s murky tragedy The Master Builder. Again, moment by moment, step by step, thought by thought, Tim let us into the dark recesses of the ageing master builder’s mind: his fear of his own frailty, but also his mesmerised response to the young Hilde Wangel (Emma Cunniffe), the new generation banging on the door. And, with the late Caroline John as his wife, he showed the agony of a marriage whose flames have turned to dust.

In 2002 I achieved a life’s ambition and directed King Lear. Tim brought an extraordinary clarity to the central part, an attention to the detail of the text, which was truthful and real, psychologically true and quietly devastating. Some felt that he didn’t achieve the leonine roar that some Lears strive for, but the scene of his madness with the blinded Gloucester (Michael Cronin), his reunion with Cordelia (Rachel Pickup) and the final moments of agony (‘pray you, undo this button’) were as moving as anything I’ve ever seen. Again, like Henry IV, the production toured the country before landing at the Old Vic to decent reviews and a successful run.

And then, in 2006, on tour and at the Trafalgar Studios, he played an upper-class English spy exiled in Russia, spending the summer on a dacha outside Moscow with his wife (Jean Marsh). Alan Bennett’s The Old Country isn’t a perfect play and some of the scenes were hard to animate, but Tim, dressed in a tatty cream suit and a ragged Garrick Club tie, brilliantly caught the dyspeptic Hilary desperately missing England but hating what he knows it has become, defending his own acts of treachery while raging against the dying of the light.

The last time I directed Tim was in Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy at the Rose.  Tim played Arthur, the independent minded father fighting the good fight against injustice and let us see both the character’s frailties with his determination that a better world was possible. Somehow, in Tim’s hands, the play’s great motto ‘Let right be done!’, spoke loud and clear to an audience increasingly concerned that justice wasn’t for everyone. It was greeted with cheers and raucous applause.

So what was it about Tim that made him such a marvellous actor?

I think  it’s a combination of several things, all of which are related to who he was as a man.

Tim’s acting was never showy, but he knew well how to fascinate; he was never vulgar, but he could be extremely funny; his approach was serious but never doctrinaire, innovative but never modish, quicksilver but not eccentric. He was never bombastic, vain, or pretentious. He had a beautiful voice and an expressive face, and used those to communicate the simplest truths.

Tim in rehearsal was energetic, robust and positive, but also self-deprecating, ironic and shy. He could detect bullshit from a hundred yards, but was open to experimentation and the new. He came from a theatrical family and belonged to a mighty tradition, but he understood that the artform was continually changing and had a passionate belief in helping young actors and directors be better. He certainly taught me more than anyone I’ve ever worked with.

Tim was a deeply political figure (Tony and Cherie Blair came to Henry IV just before the 1997 election), who had a passionate interest in his audience, whoever they might be or wherever they came from. He rejected the snobbery that is so common in the theatre, and combined broad popular appeal with personal integrity, a commitment to quality with an insistence on accessibility, and an unshakeable commitment to the enduring value of regional theatre.

With Tim’s death, the British theatre has lost one of its finest. He was an extraordinary actor, but he was also an extraordinary man, driven by decency, boundless good humour and an unshakeable belief in his fellow human beings. We are all in his debt.

May we learn from his many qualities and may his memory be a blessing.

Adrian Schiller (1964-2024)

In some ways, I’m the missing link. 

As Ginny said, the first time I met Adrian was 20 years ago, when I didn’t cast him as Feste.

What she didn’t tell you was that later that day I booked Ginny herself and we’ve been an item ever since. I guess I felt that one Schiller at a time was wisdom.

And so here I am, a crossover between Adrian’s professional life and his family life, between his public world and his private. It’s a good place to be.

I soon met the rest of their family. And they welcomed me and my two lads in the kindest way imaginable. 

And since then I’ve turned up at endless family do’s: mostly happy, sometimes tense; often serious, but more often utterly joyous.

And soon, Adrian became a dear friend: he wasn’t just Ginny’s brother, he was my brother too. 

My bro as we’d call each other.

He’d be in and out of our flat, cadging a bed and leaving a trail of mobile phones, house keys and hats behind him, but endlessly holding forth, making us laugh, cooking delicious food, lecturing us on his latest bit of desperately arcane knowledge and then, in a way which many of you will remember, the two of us would stay up into the small hours and, deep into the second bottle of red, sort shit out. 

It always came as a disappointment that the next morning the shit was still there. 

The world needs you more than ever, Adrian Schiller. Time to sort shit out.

We bonded over personal things too. He was very kind to me when I got ill and I tried to help him through some dark moments of his own. He successfully led Laurie astray and tried in vain to educate Bea. And he showed an amazing connection with Joey—like so many of us, I think he learnt from Joey’s silence—and we’d talk about the challenges faced by people with learning disabilities. I’m certainly there to support Milena and her and Adrian’s gorgeous Gabriel. 

I finally cast Adrian a few years later, as De Flores in The Changeling. God, he was scary, but so also was he careful to show an outcast, someone who didn’t really belong—some of the same qualities that shaped his amazingly good Shylock on this very stage. 

He next worked with me at the Rose with Christmas Carol. In a brilliant company (assembled by Ginny) he played a stack of parts, but I’ll never forget the tech when he insisted on playing (and singing) Jacob Marley as Bob Marley.  

And then, as we’ve seen, Adrian became a professional Jew.  Jew-ish, indeed.

In fact, the last thing I directed him in was Barabas, the title role in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. It was a bonkers project but Adrian played a deeply logical response to the dazzling hypocrisy of Christian persecution, while also showing a rare passion in his growing rage. 

And it’s on that theme that I’d like to end by talking a bit about my play The Gift, which I wrote for Adrian a few years ago.

The play is a fusion of two families’ stories—Adrian’s father’s arrived in England from Austria in 1938, and my Mum (who’s here this evening) came from Hamburg in 1936. 

The main character, Gustav Hirsch, is a distinguished German-Jewish gynaecologist who has come to England with his three children, but without his beloved wife.

In creating Gustav, I was inspired by Adrian himself.  I wanted to catch some of his contradictions, in all their productive brilliance. 

Thus:

·   Gustav/Adrian is convinced that good science and rational thinking will usher in a better world, while simultaneously embracing the irrationality of art—high art, low art, all kinds of art—and the consolations that it brings.   

·    Gustav/Adrian is deeply serious about the things that matter, while relishing an irrepressible sense of the absurd. Indeed, the absurd helps him get closer to the serious. Laughter reveals the truth.

·     Gustav/Adrian is deeply committed to his family and everything that family means, while also knowing that the only family that really matters is the human family. 

I remember one evening Adrian sitting on our white sofa like a middle-aged Orpheus playing Bach on his guitar, and it struck me then that he embodied something rare, a set of characteristics which are almost extinct.  He felt like a torchbearer for a time when artists were also scientists, when deep thinkers could laugh at themselves, when mighty brains knew that being clever wasn’t everything, when people whose love for their family and their colleagues was only matched by their dedication to making a better world.

Both in his inheritance and in what he saw around him, Adrian knew about racism, ableism, cruelty and bullying, but he observed it with incredulity that anyone could indulge in such behaviour. It wasn’t just hateful to Adrian, it had no reason to exist. It was utterly ludicrous. 

And that, ultimately, was grounds for optimism.

People would sometimes call Adrian an ‘eternal student’, usually as a term of affectionate reproach. I think I did so myself.

The Right would call him a ‘citizen of nowhere’, a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, a ‘wandering Jew’, even.  And we know where that language leads.

But the fact is that Adrian, and people like Adrian, point the way to a better world, a happier world, a more open-minded world, which embraces difference, refuses to subject himself to a greater power, and celebrates instead the best of life, in all its richness and beauty, its kindness and frailty, even its Bacchanalian silliness, and urges the rest of us to do the same.   

And for that, and so much else, I’ll always love you, bro.

May your memory be a blessing.

(Spoken at Adrian’s Memorial, Sunday 13th October, 2024)

John Burgess (1947-2024)

I feel very honoured to be asked to speak today, but also a bit daunted.

I realise that I first met John more than 40 years ago, way back in 1981 when he was encouraging to me as a student director and helped me on my first steps into the business.  

And I’ve always thought of him as a big brother whose approval mattered to me.

So I’d better not screw this up.

In thinking about what to say today, I settled on a few key words and phrases which I hope will catch something of what John stood for, as a director, teacher and champion of new writing for the theatre.

The first is:

1.    Knowledge

John was extraordinarily, amazingly knowledgeable. 

It was fascinating watching him collaborating with his lifelong friend and colleague, the great director and playwright Peter Gill: Peter understood everything about the play intuitively, but it was John who knew the facts. It was like watching the two sides of the brain.     

And John was by far the best-read person I’ve ever known, always clutching a thick volume from the London Library. I can’t count the number of books he recommended to me but it says something that the last two were the Diaries of Count Harry Kessler and the Journals of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt.  

Which takes me to my second word:

2.    International

The world is wide and John embraced it.

He spoke fluent French and excellent German and despite his commitment to the Englishness of the English tradition his admiration for the best of the German theatre—Brecht and Peter Stein—and the three months he spent with Roger Planchon at the Theatre Nationale Populaire, shaped his tastes in more ways than he was happy to admit.

I remember John joking that the English theatre rediscovered the European drama in a fit of excitement every ten years: for John it was a constant. He was a true European.

3.    Classicism

John studied classics at Cambridge and in 2005 wrote the Faber Guide to Greek and Roman Drama. Unlike most of us, he read the plays in the original and his comments on the various translations are pithy: ‘To be avoided’ is one of my favourites. The book is terrific.

John directed Kleist’s The Prince of Homburg at the National and commissioned translations of Calderon, Moliere, Marivaux, Goethe and others.

For John, who was brought up near Stratford-upon-Avon, the classics were to be enjoyed unselfconsciously: their qualities might be strange, the world they describe alien, but they are part of the air that we breathe.

He directed Richard III in Iceland and knew his Shakespeare inside out.

And, of course, the next word is:

4.    Playwrights

In a time when the theatre hails the director, the designer or the leading actor as the primary creative force, John championed the playwright. His theatre was a writers’ theatre.

From his early years at the Open Space and the Riverside Studios in the 1970s to his time as Associate Director at the NT Studio and Head of New Writing at the National in the 1980s and 1990s, his work with living playwrights lay at the heart of everything he did.

The number of dramatists he discovered, helped, challenged, commissioned and championed is astonishing. And if I don’t try to list them all, it’s because we don’t have the time and I’ll forget someone remarkable. You can find out more from his website.

John’s teaching of emerging playwriting is, perhaps his greatest legacy. The playwriting group he ran at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton between 2000 and 2012 was extraordinary and the much-loved John Burgess Play Writing Course was in its 14th year when he died. It’s a mark of his unique qualities that it’s impossible to imagine anyone being able to reproduce what he offered.

Some of John’s playwrights are here today to pay their respects and others who have sent their apologies. I know they all know how lucky they were to have worked with John. 

5.    Speak the Speech 

I remember John once telling me that you could tell whether a play was any good by reading the first couple of pages. If the dialogue had crackle, if it flew off the page into the mouth of the actor, the play was likely to be good, whatever happened in the plot.  

But if it didn’t, well, why bother?

And so it was revealing to read the ‘basic building blocks’ of John’s play writing course: ‘Words of one syllable, rhythm, exits and entrances, building a page, surprise, stichomythia, images, actions, silence.’

Energy. Truth. Simplicity. 

Which takes me to the sixth word:

6.    Politics

John was an intensely political person, shaped by the radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s. He despaired of the venality, incompetence and cruelty of generations of Tories and canvassed for progressive politics to the end.

But his understanding of politics went far beyond party politics.

Despite—or perhaps because of—all his learning, John’s vision was of a theatre which engaged with the everyday, gave a platform to forgotten voices and challenged the status quo.

Let me offer three glimpses: 

• The Garden of England in 1985 at the height of the Miners’ Strike with the Cottesloe (as it was then called) crammed to the rafters with Kent Miners and their families: ‘coal not dole’ stickers wherever you looked.

• Black Poppies in 1987, a documentary drama about black soldiers in the British army.

• Debbie Horsfield’s and Sarah Daniels’ brilliant plays at the National about working-class women in the 1980s and 1990s: it’s an intriguing fact that John directed more plays by women than any other male director at the National Theatre.

John opened the stage door and let real life flood in, in all its contradiction. The modern theatre could learn from his example. 

And so my last word is the most important:

7.    Humanity

John was in some ways an old-fashioned English moralist. And all the better for it. 

He wasn’t interested in the usual rewards of the profession and his career had its downs as well as its ups. He was never the toast of fashionable London and to an extent operated in the shadows. He despised snobbery and unearned status, and was as likely to be seen in a tiny fringe theatre in Balham as at the National.

What mattered to John, I think, was the quality, the living energy, the human truth of what was being shown. Anything else was, as he’d sometimes say, a waste of an evening.

In brief then, John thought that the theatre should tell the truth about how people live their lives. It should bear witness to humanity.  It should help us see the world more clearly and so, perhaps, live better lives.

Those of us who knew John and were lucky enough to walk with him will always remember his brilliant mind and intellectual curiosity, his sharp wit and his wry smile, his undying loyalty to those he respected and his crisp critique of those he didn’t, but, above all, his friendship, decency and unquestioning instinct for kindness. 

Farewell, dear John.

May your memory be a blessing

Laughing Boy countdown

What a thing Laughing Boy is.

Rehearsals have been extraordinary: uproarious laughter one moment, overwhelming sadness the next; veering from outrage against the system that failed Connor so badly to incredulity at the way that his mother Sara and his family were treated; driven by an absolute commitment to Connor’s story, while also knowing that we must offer our own creative response, our own version, if the play is to mean anything.

I’m writing this on my day off.

After our final run through in the rehearsal room yesterday we unrolled and spent an hour looking at the utterly beautiful Justice Quilt. What an amazing thing.  It brought the whole campaign into vivid life.  I’m thrilled that it’s going to be hung in St James’ Piccadilly, just along from the theatre, for the duration of the run.

And tomorrow the technical rehearsal starts: those extraordinarily creative days when the whole thing finally comes together.  Hour after hour of adjustments and discoveries, the decisions and insights that shape so much of what the audience will experience. 

And what’s strange is that although today I know what the set looks like, how the actors are playing their parts, the details of the projections, the music and even the lighting, I don’t really know what the final result will be. And as playwright and director, both sides of my brain are filled, with pleasure and anxiety, joy and fear, emotion and thought.  I’m knackered.

And then this: we have our first preview this Thursday and I’m told that along with the production team the theatre is jammed with Connor’s family and friends, and so many of the people involved in the campaign.  All people who, one way or another, feature in the play.

What are they going to think? How are they going to feel? Gulp!

But as I said to Sara: I know this will be weird, but I don’t want it to be weird for the wrong reason.   

And that’s the point.

Because what I know for certain is that everyone involved in putting Laughing Boy on—the actors, the creative and technical teams and the amazing people at Jermyn Street Theatre—is utterly committed not just to celebrating Connor and the love and laughter that he inspired, but to insisting on the infinite value of people like Connor—people like my Joey and so many others—and demand that our society finally grants them the full humanity that they so manifestly deserve.

As Sara said, ‘I want people to leave the theatre and think, bloody hell, that boy mattered’.

A change has to happen.