Overview
Although disabled characters appear often in plays within the Western
theatrical tradition, seldom have the writers been disabled or Deaf
themselves, or written from those atypical embodied experiences. This is
what contributes to making Kaite O'Reilly's Selected Plays essential
reading - critically acclaimed plays and performance texts written in a
range of styles over twelve years, but all informed by a political and
cultural disability perspective. They 'answer back' to the moral and
medical models of disability and attempt to subvert or critique
assumptions and negative representations of disabled people. The
selected plays and performance texts exhibit a broad approach to issues
around disability. Some, like In Water I'm Weightless/The 'd' Monologues
(part of the Cultural Olympiad and official festival celebrating the
2012 London Olympics and Paralympics) are embedded in disability
politics, aesthetics, and 'crip' humour. A montage of monologues that
can be performed solo or as a chorus, they challenge the normative gaze
and celebrate all the possibilities of human variety.The Almond and the
Seahorse is different, a 'mainstream' character-led realist drama about
survivors of Traumatic Brain Injury, with subversive politics in its
belly.
A response to 'tragic but brave' depictions of head injury and memory
loss, and informed by personal experience, the play interrogates the
reality of living with TBI, questioning who the 'victims' are. peeling, a
landmark play written for one Deaf and two disabled female actors, was
originally produced by Graeae Theatre Company in 2002, 2003, and for BBC
Radio 3. A 'feminist masterpiece...quietly ground breaking' (Joyce
McMillan, The Scotsman), it has become a set text for Theatre and Drama
and Disability Studies university degree courses in the UK and US.
Frequently remounted, its lively meta-theatrical form supports its
central themes of war, eugenics, and a woman's control over her
fertility, which are as relevant today as ever. The performance text the
9 Fridas is a complex mosaic offering multiple representations of
arguably the world's most famous female artist, Frida Kahlo, reclaiming
her as a disability icon.Performed in Mandarin translation, it was the
closing production of the 2014 Taipei Art Festival and will transfer to
Hong Kong in October 2016. It is currently being translated into German,
Hindi, and Spanish.
Cosy is a darkly comedic look at the joys and humiliations of getting
older and how we shuffle off this mortal coil. Three generations of a
dysfunctional family explore their choices in a world obsessed with
eternal youth, and asks whose life (or death) is it, anyway? An
Unlimited Commission, Cosy will premiere and tour nationally in 2016,
appearing at the Unlimited Festivals at Southbank Centre and Tramway.