Jo Caird: Why Society Needs to Put Disability in the Spotlight

Last
week, the comedian Ricky Gervais found himself at the centre of a
media storm following his use of the word ‘mong’ on Twitter. When
people called him on it, having found the word offensive because
of its history as a demeaning term for people with Down’s Syndrome,
Gervais claimed that ‘mong’ now means ‘idiot’ and nothing more and
refused to apologise or stop using the word. Eventually, after a
conversation with disability campaigner Nicola Clark (whose blog post
on the subject you can read here), in which she described how her
disabled daughters have had the word ‘mong’ directed at them as an
insult and how hurtful it is when it happens, Gervais apologised and
admitted he’d be naïve. Not, however, before thousands of people on
Twitter spent several days throwing offensive, disablist language
around the internet, supposedly in Gervais’s defence. It was not a
pretty sight.

The
most troubling aspect of the whole episode is that it reveals how
discriminatory attitudes to disabled people are simmering beneath the
surface of our supposedly fair and open society. This won’t be news
to many disabled people, I imagine, some of whom report encountering
abuse on a depressingly frequent basis, but it’s an unpleasant
wake-up call for those of us who naively assume that generally,
people are decent to one another and that hate of this kind is rare.

Which
is where disability theatre comes in. Discriminatory attitudes
persist because a lack of visibility for the discriminated against
group fosters a scenario where misunderstanding prospers and hateful
views remain unchallenged. Some commentators suggest
that the government’s current rhetoric and policies around disability
and the benefits system is actually making things worse, implicitly
condoning disablist attitudes by painting disabled people as
scroungers.

Whether
or not this is the case – and the blog I link to above raised
plenty of debate on the matter – we’re in an undeniably sorry state
in terms of media and artistic representation of disabled people,
with eight million people living with disabilities in the UK whose
stories are largely ignored by mainstream drama. Disability theatre –
and its natural legacy, the opening
up of the world of television to disabled actors who’ve been able to
access top class training opportunities and professional experience
via the UK’s leading disabled and disabled-led theatre companies –
has a crucial role to play in increasing the visibility of disabled
people in British society.

Changing long-held views is not an easy
course, and progress is painfully slow, but I firmly believe that
every time a disabled-led company receives good notices in the
national press – as with Graeae’s Reasons to be
Cheerful last year – or a deaf or disabled actor appears
in a mainstream show – a recent example being Nabil Shaban‘s
assured performance as Constantius in Emperor and
Galilean at the National Theatre this summer – a few more people’s
eyes are opened to the idiocy of discrimination and society gradually
benefits. And in the meantime, of course, audiences are treated to fantastic
theatre.