It’s been quite an autumn, and the leaves are still burnishing the trees… September has been a blaze of touring, festivals, and launches. My Unlimited International Commission And Suddenly I Disappear: The Singapore/~UK ‘d’ Monologues premiered at the Southbank Centre in London prior to a whistle-stop tour taking in Leicester, Oxford, and Cardiff, garnering 4 and 5 star reviews along the way – more of which in a future blog.
The Llanarth Group brought richard iii redux to Grenzenlos Kulture Festival in Mainz, Germany, where I launched my latest publication after the performance.
The d Monologues is the culmination of ten years work, featuring solos I have written specifically for Deaf and disabled performers, varying in length from audition-size 3 minutes monologues to the 70 minute one woman show richard iii redux co-written with Phillip Zarrilli. Monologues from my recent international collaboration are included in the book: And Suddenly I Disappear, along with In Water I’m Weightless, my Cultural Olympiad production with National Theatre Wales, featuring extended, new, unperformed and previously unpublished monologues. It also has A Preface in Three Voices, written by John E McGrath, Ruth Gould and Jo Verrent. Below, an excerpt from the introduction.
For a limited time, the collection is available from the Oberon website with a 30% discount, using code DMONO30
The ‘d’ Monologues by Kaite O’Reilly.
from The Introduction
I like to think of theatre as a place of communication and exploration, of dissent and inquiry: a place of dreaming, of solving, of challenging the present and imagining the future. It’s that communal place where we can express all the possibilities of what it is to be human – so why are the majority of representations still so limited in scope and variety, and the potential of those bodies so prescribed?
I have been angry most of my life. Identifying as a working class Irish immigrant disabled female creates a certain kind of friction, a blistering energy I’ve found best directed into creative pursuits. Some years ago, somewhere along my raging, cursing way, I encountered Gandhi’s advice about being the change you want to see, and so the project The ‘d’ Monologues was born.
These collected solos are the culmination of a decade’s work trying to instigate change through writing work specifically for D/deaf and disabled actors, ‘answering back’ to the largely negative representations of difference in our media and the Western theatrical canon.
Since the Ancient Greeks disabled characters have appeared in plays, but rarely have the writers been disabled or written from that embodied or politicised perspective. The vast majority of disabled characters in the Western theatrical canon are tropes, reinforcing limited notions of what it is to be ʻnormalʼ rather than broadening the lens and embracing all the possibilities of human variety. So prevalent is the atypical body in our stage and TV dramas, the audience(s) assume they know and understand the realities of disabled and D/deaf individuals’ lives, yet few of these narratives are informed by lived experience, and so misconceptions and ableist notions of difference, shaped by the medical and charity models of disability, are reproduced and reinforced.
I wanted to make work solely for disabled and D/deaf performers, informed by the social model of disability. Like gender, I believe that disability is a social construct, and it is the physical and attitudinal barriers which disable us, not the idiosyncrasies of our bodies.
This collection is the culmination of ten years work, with fictional monologues inspired by over 100 interviews, conversations, and interactions with D/deaf and disabled individuals internationally. It brings together new and previously unperformed texts alongside monologues from In Water I’m Weightless (National Theatre Wales/Cultural Olympiad 2012), the 70 minute one woman show richard iii redux, and the multilingual, intercultural And Suddenly I Disappear.
I’ve always loved the notion of disabled and D/deaf performers all over the world presenting with pride and political urgency performance texts which did not reduce them to parodies, metaphors, villains, or inspiration porn stars – different narratives using alternative dramaturgies, theatre languages and channels of communication. These texts did not exist, so following Gandhi’s advice, I decided to be the change I wanted to see.
To buy the collection with a 30% discount, go here and enter the discount code DMONO30 at check out. This code is available for a limited time.
‘I write disabled characters who aren’t evil, piteous, or helpless.’ Read an interview with Kaite in The Guardian Society here
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