Carriageworks, Sydney
Five actors with intellectual disabilities explore a world dominated by artificial intelligence in a play that’s anything but sweet
Fri 27 Sep 2019 03.55 BST
Last modified on Fri 27 Sep 2019 06.43 BST
If artificial intelligence took over the world, would human beings all end up living with an intellectual disability?
So asks the acclaimed theatre company Back to Back in its new play, The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes – a question made all the more pertinent by a cast made up entirely of actors with intellectual disabilities ranging from autism to Down’s syndrome.
The play opens on five characters setting up a town hall meeting. They drag plastic chairs onto the empty stage and lay down a strip of yellow tape to separate themselves from the audience. A block of white polystyrene becomes a makeshift pulpit.
Modern city life provides plenty of distractions when we encounter something different or uncomfortable. We retreat to other faces in the crowd, the sidewalk, smart phones. With his spartan set design, director Bruce Gladwin keeps our eyes right where he wants them for 70 minutes: on actors Michael Chan, Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price and Mark Deans, who were also his co-creators.
Gladwin’s performers grapple with struggles large and small: frustration at not being verbally understood; confusions over etiquette (why can you touch yourself in the bathroom but never in public); the endless medication and therapeutic programs they endure to approximate some sense of “normal”.
The play takes a step further. The current debate over what is “normal” rests on the assumption of a baseline character: male, white, cisgendered and straight. But here, the cast flips the script.
What about a world dominated by computers – is it really that far off? – one in which “normals” are suddenly unable to compete mentally or physically. “Like a chicken or a turkey,” one actor says. “Or someone with a disability.”
To this point, a screen above the stage has been broadcasting dialogue. The discrepancy over what is heard on stage and what is typed up on the screen, especially when it comes to swear words, provides plenty of laughs.
But now, the same screen begins to interact with the actors, becoming a character in and of itself – one that is omnipresent but also sympathetic.
The concept is clever. Narratives about disabled characters often focus on their overcoming long odds – think Eddie Redmayne’s depiction of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. Such stories are designed, in part, to make the “normal” audience watching it feel good, to allow them to clap themselves on the back for having shown up at all.
The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes has flaws. It is 20 minutes too long, for a start. But its quality comes from bucking such Hollywood clichés. In this play, nothing is overcome. There are no answers. Even the five characters on stage disagree over basic terminology. Some feel proud to say they are intellectually disabled; others don’t want to use the term at all.
On the night I attended, an older man next to me kept muttering “sweet, sweet,” as if he were at his kid’s kindergarten play. It summed up the challenge of performing for disabled actors – particularly when audiences assume the play should be about therapy or charity.
Sweet? No. The whole point of The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes – and the world they depict, for themselves and for the rest of us – is that it is anything but.
• The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes by Back to Back Theatre is showing at Sydney’s Carriageworks until 28 September, before touring Geelong Arts Centre and Melbourne International Arts Festival in October, before heading to the US in 2020
