I believe that we connect better in fantasy or art than we do when we are just sitting talking to each other.”
Cian Binchy is explaining why, as an autistic man, he makes stage shows: “We connect when we don’t get too close, when we are not too intimate. We connect better when the curtain is up than when it is down.”
Binchy is keen to connect. He wants people to understand more about the autistic experience: “I would like to spread the awareness to people who don’t know about autism, and not just about people with my own kind of autism, but also those like my brother who has severe autism and is not verbal. It’s important that when we talk about people with autism, it’s not just those who are verbal.”
The 34-year-old Londoner is obviously a man on a mission but, if that leads you to think his new show will be an earnest and dull affair, think again.
The show, A Small Enclosed Room With Alfie Murphy, is a riot of ideas and entertainment, billed as a “darkly comic new play exploring masking, autism, mental health and fantasy” that leads the audience through Binchy’s imagination.
He explains that his character, Alfie Murphy, is a pompous “rock god”. He is also a yoga guru who is very spiritual and does not want to be put on a pedestal – “except that secretly he does”.
Alfie sounds like he could be an alter ego for Binchy but there are other forces in the show that he describes as “trying to stop the show and get me to be Cian Binchy”.
Binchy characterises these figures as sharks based on an image that came to his mind once in a similar situation: “The shark is a symbol of when you’re trapped in a corner and somebody is stopping your game.”
The show recognises that people try to avoid problems by ignoring them but Binchy says that if people don’t confront them, they will surely face the same issues again in a different situation.
“If you are a shark, you can escape other sharks, but you are still a shark and you can’t escape that. You can escape lots of people but the one person you can’t escape is yourself.”
Binchy developed the show with support from London-based Access All Areas (AAA), an arts charity that supports learning disabled and autistic artists in creating performance-based work. The show is a collaboration between AAA and The Lowry arts centre in Salford.
Binchy is an AAA associate, as well as the organisation’s digital content creator and presenter of its YouTube series, Access Not Denied, which identifies classic autism stereotypes in the media.
He has been involved in a number of other AAA shows over the past 10 years, most recently Imposter 22, which was on the main stage of London’s Royal Court (Community Living, winter 2024).
The shows have broken new ground not only in presenting the voices of people with learning disabilities and autism but also in their use of innovative and immersive approaches to theatre.
Binchy created the show in collaboration with writers Shaun Dunne and Leah Moore. “It was kind of challenging because we had different ideas but I am always up for a challenge and it worked in the end,” he says.
“They brought a lot of humour to it. They brought the rhythm. The dialogue is more like performance poetry. They also brought the idea of the ghostwriter which is a brilliant idea.”
I would love to play a baddie. I think I have that look about me, if I say so myself. Quite menacing
In the play, Alfie wants to tell his story but his own ghostwriter wants to tell it a different way, “with poetic licence”.
The parallels with people with learning disabilities and autism, who have so often had their own stories told for them, are painfully obvious.
Binchy collaborated with the other main performer in the show, Anna Constable, who is also autistic an associate artist at AAA. “She brought an emotional depth to the show. Well, I think I did too, but she goes that bit further.”
The first time I saw Binchy perform was a few years ago in an immersive, interactive show called Madhouse Re:Exit (Community Living, summer 2018) which explored themes of social care and institutionalisation.
He was dressed in an outsize pink baby’s romper suit to point to the infantilisation of learning-disabled adults. Luckily (unlike some in the audience), I managed to avoid changing his nappy.
First a friar
Binchy tells me that he started acting in school plays. At 11, his first major role was as Friar Tuck in Robin Hood.
He recalls: “I was a very fat kid and Friar Tuck is known for being fat. You’re not supposed to say the word fat about other people these days but, back in Robin Hood’s time, it was OK to say fat. Fat shaming wasn’t a thing back then.”
In 2007, Binchy performed rap and performance poetry at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith before discovering AAA and becoming, in 2014, one of the first students on the charity’s performance-making diploma course, which still runs today.
What other roles would Binchy love to perform? He answers without hesitation: “I would love to play a baddie. I think I have that look about me, if I say so myself. Quite menacing.”
And he cannot resist elaborating: “I’d love to play a baddie who has got a sad back story. So you understand why they are bad. But you don’t make excuses for them. Life is tough but it doesn’t mean that you can go around doing bad stuff.
“You do feel for them. But you feel bad for feeling for them because they are baddies. You shouldn’t. They are wicked. Life is bloody complicated.”
Nick Llewellyn, AAA artistic director, who has been sitting in with us for the interview, emphasises the importance of creating work with people who have lived experience.
He describes how too often drama involving people with learning disabilities and autism settle into two well-worn ruts.
The first he calls “What are we going to do with them?” featuring parents or carers “at their wit’s end” with someone who is “having meltdowns all the time”. The second is the dramas he labels “We can do it too”, where a group of people get together to do a musical or a play written by Shakespeare or someone else.
“There is no agency there, no creativity, no autonomy, no sense of creative voices that don’t have a platform or voice in society,” he says.
In contrast, AAA is pushing for a real platform for the voices of the excluded.
Llewellyn recognises that, despite the tough financial environment after austerity, there are signs of change, particularly in television.
“There is a real concerted effort now by broadcasters to get more disabled people on television,” he observes. AAA associate and actor Dayo Koleosho is starring in BBC soap EastEnders.
As for Binchy, his long-term ambition is to get his work out of the disabled world and into the mainstream although he adds: “I also want to do more to help my community.”
He says: “I am going to try to do some work similar to Access All Areas, you know, helping people into performance work. But also to keep speaking up for people who can’t speak up for themselves.”
A Small Enclosed Room With Alfie Murphy will be touring the UK in 2025
