Robert Gale – actor, activist and disability consultant – talks about his recent National Theatre of Scotland production, ‘Girl X’. More of an on-stage debate between protagonist (Robert) and the public at large, the production sparked debate about the ethics of medical intervention in profoundly disabled children as well as what actually constitutes a play.
When I first approached the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) with a concept around which I wanted to create a piece of theatre, they told me to go away and think again! The second idea I came up with – to make something around the issue of growth attenuation for disabled people and specifically around the case of Ashley X from Washington state in the US – caught their attention. Ashley was a pre-teen girl who had been born with a complex impairment that was described as being like Cerebral Palsy – she couldn’t walk, talk, feed herself or support her own head. Ashley’s parents, in consultation with her doctor, decided that it would make her life easier if she was kept the size of a nine-year old – they gave her hormones to keep her small, removed her breasts and gave her a hysterectomy, all to make her easier to carry around and look after.
The issue raised debate in the press at the time – it’s one that people tend to have a very visceral reaction to – and NTS agreed with me that it was an issue that needed to be explored. They paired me up with Pol Heyveart, a Belgian director who had just finished working on ‘Aalst’ for NTS. ‘Aalst’ focused on a story of infanticide so I knew that Pol liked to take on difficult subjects, and he did so in a way that didn’t sentimentalise the issue. It would have been so easy to write something about this poor, helpless disabled girl who had suffered at the hands of her parents – a cop-out in my eyes as I wanted audiences to examine their own thoughts and beliefs.
So, let’s fast-forward through three and a half years of development, a writing process and a tour of Scottish venues from March to May 2011. Did ‘Girl X’, as the piece is named, do what I wanted it to?
‘Girl X’ wasn’t the first time that NTS had employed a disabled actor but it was, as far as I know, the first time that they staged a piece which had been artistically co-driven by a disabled person and explicitly engaged in what could be considered to be disability art. For a national company to be doing so was a big deal – the pressure was on.
Audiences were frequently surprised by what ‘Girl X’ gave them, most expecting the story of a fictionalised Ashley. Instead they got a staged debate between me and fifteen community chorus choir members. My ‘character’ in the show was called Robert, so the lines between theatre and reality were extremely blurred. Some audience-members didn’t like this – they wanted ‘a play’ – but many others revelled in the form. Another frequent comment received was that ‘Girl X’ didn’t answer people’s questions, and I’m so glad it didn’t: it was never anyone’s intention to make a piece that gave answers – ultimately I don’t think there are a lot of real answers to this issue – but I hope we made people think about things in a new way.
‘Girl X’ wasn’t without fault – I’d be the last person to claim it was. I agree with comments that I received from a few disabled friends who felt that I could have gone further and presented more complex arguments. Would that have made it less accessible to a mainstream audience? Possibly. But, ultimately, a baffling contradiction was created by the show: as a fairly articulate disabled person, I was given access to the resources and reputation of our national theatre company to express my views on the situation of another disabled person who, for whatever reasons that led to her impairment being of greater severity than mine, couldn’t express whether she wanted to grow up to be an adult.
Read Mark Fisher’s review of ‘GIrl X’ in the Guardian here.
