What happened when Ellen Goodey received an Arts Council grant to direct a play? She and her dad, historian Chris Goodey (author of A history of intelligence and ‘intellectual disability’) decided to write a play together. Then Ellen put it on the stage. Chris Goodey takes up the story.
In 2012, Ellen Goodey received an Arts Council grant to direct a play. The idea came from the Ramira Arts Collective’s Ray Downing, based at Stratford Circus Theatre in East London. He saw no reason why someone with learning difficulties and lots of performing arts experience should not have the chance to be a director. He suggested that Ellen and I write a play between us, on any subject we liked.
Even though we immediately came up with two completely different ideas, and even though we are father and daughter, we managed to blend. Ellen’s idea, stimulated by what was going in her personal life at the time, was a play about the things that are with us all the time: life, death, duty, friendship. And I wanted to do something that illustrated my research on the history of learning disability.
Interleaved
In phase 1, we developed a script for The Princess of the Graveyard Palace. Ellen wrote the lines for her story about a dying king, a princess reluctant to take over, and her friend who somehow holds things together. This was interleaved with scenes from history that were presented as the princess’s dreams. There was also a dramatic (but intentional) intervention, mid-performance, by the late Mabel Cooper, who had spent twenty years in an institution. Ellen and I wrote the final scene together, in which the two worlds fuse. Ellen was supported to direct the whole piece (I stayed out of this part). Two pilot performances were given in December 2012. On this basis we succeeded in getting a phase 2 grant to develop the play into something that might eventually be shown to the general public.
Both phases had an inclusive cast. The second time around, Ellen decided that rather than cast members having to learn lots of lines, she would rewrite her scenes in terms of movement, dance and music. Not only did these particular scenes then blossom enormously, they really highlighted the values of the performers, and their insistence on what is important in life. And at the same time they pointed up the absurdity of the scenes based on historical events about discrimination (not only in the form of learning disability), which remained in dialogue form.
What have we learnt so far? That if you have faith and patience, and if you give your director and actors the time and space, they will take you and the audience somewhere you didn’t know about. At least, you will think you didn’t, but then it turns out as if you are looking for the very first time at what is in fact utterly familiar.
The artistic evaluators reporting to the Arts Council were very positive and we are about to apply for a final grant to give public performances.
For Ellen on this play and many other things, see www.ellengoodey.co.uk.
For Chris on history, see www.historyoflearningdisability.com/site-authors-e-texts/chris-goodey/the-psychologists/
