Fri 1 Mar 2019 12.30 GMT
Last modified on Fri 1 Mar 2019 15.55 GMT
I don’t often cry when I go to the theatre. I certainly don’t often have to dig my fingernails into my palm in order to keep my feelings under control, but that is what happened during a performance of Christina Murdock’s one woman play Dangerous Giant Animals – next on at The Vaults in London between 6 and 10 March. Described as “a darkly comedic show about finding your voice amid your sister’s screams”, it tells the story of Christina’s San Francisco childhood with her younger sister, who has atypical Rett syndrome, speech apraxia and severe epilepsy. “She loves the spotlight, and movies like Jurassic Park and Jaws, hence the title of the show,” Murdock tells me.
The play resonated with me because, as many Guardian readers will know from my writing, my own brother has severe autism. I encountered Murdock’s work for the first time last year at a meeting for the charity Sibs (for brothers and sisters of disabled siblings and adults), where I was making a speech. The day was an intensely moving experience, because it was the first time that I had ever sat in a room with people whose experiences were very much like mine, who understood profoundly the emotions that I was describing as the sibling of a vulnerable person; lurching between protectiveness and fury, sadness and hilarity, heartbreak and love.
As a child and teenager, I had resisted any contact with charities, partly because I had a notion that I would feel like a charity case, and partly because life was, to me, a kind of normal, but this did mean that there were moments of loneliness. “I wrote Dangerous Giant Animals because I hadn’t heard my story on stage. I just thought that there must be others in that world. Such a huge part of the disability world is isolation,” Murdock tells me. Carers can very easily become cut off, especially when behaviour becomes challenging, as it has been in the case of Murdock’s sister and my own brother.
The love and tension between the character of Claire (played by Murdock) and her sister, Monica, (who, as this is a one-woman show) we have to imagine, forms the core of the play, asking audience members to consider the nuances of their relationship – is it reasonable for the neurotypical sister to desire her parents’ attention? How comfortable are we with the anger she sometimes feels towards her disabled sibling? It is a sophisticated portrayal of disability; we see neither a martyr in the caring sibling or an angel in the vulnerable one. “I’m not painting myself as this character to sympathise with,” says Murdock. “I try to take the audience on this journey of, whose side are we on? And I try by the end [to convey] that actually, it doesn’t matter. Some days you’re the bad guy, and sometimes she’s the bad guy.”
When you have a singular, life-defining experience, it can feel difficult to connect with others and communicate it to them, not only because of the isolation, but also because many other people have no reference points with regards to what you’ve been through. You have to break through a kind of barrier in order to tell the story. In the past, I have felt that people sometimes avoid art or writing that deals with the subject of disability because they have no personal experience of it, or because they think it will be too sad or depressing. Though many of us will age and need carers ourselves, we prefer not to think about it.
While these stories are often sad, there is also humour. The humour of people with disabilities, their loved ones, of care workers and medical professionals and friends is so often hidden, because people with no experience of the issue struggle to cope with it. Is it OK to laugh? This is sad stuff, isn’t solemnity required? And yet this is life (and death): people soil themselves, their false teeth fall out on their deathbeds, someone asks for a light at the crematorium. It’s not gallows humour, exactly, just the understanding that life can be absurd.
The key to making good art about illness and disability is capturing that absurdity, and Dangerous Giant Animals does that. We are seeing increasingly nuanced portrayals both by people with disabilities and their loved ones. It’s about time. We’ve seen Henry Normal’s A Normal Family and the BBC4 comedy drama There She Goes. My own mother has written a book about my brother, Your Life As I Knew it. But we still need more, especially from disabled people themselves, though I’m not sure how much fingernail digging my palm can take. Murdock tells me that after seeing Dangerous Giant Animals, her mother sobbed. “She said, ‘That was the most beautiful tribute to your sister,” and then I just started bawling. I was like: “And to you. This is also for you, Mom.’”
• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/01/art-disabled-sibling-new-play-cry-stories
