As we await the beginning of It’s A Motherf**king Pleasure, the projection screen declares "This is a caption screen", with a pop-up in the reassuring hues of Windows XP occasionally appearing to inform us that "This is a safe space". It’s a relatively innocuous lead-in to the tone and frame-breaking style of this assured debut piece from the disability-led theatre company FlawBored, now touring following last summer’s successful Fringe run.
When Sam Brewer, Chloe Palmer and Eli London emerge to welcome us, they introduce themselves with audio descriptions and a brief rundown of the layout of the stage, for the benefit of visually impaired audience members. Two of the cast themselves are visually impaired, and one of these, Sam, explains that as an accommodation for this, the lights will be slightly dimmed to help avoid the dazzling effect he experiences. The lights lower. In order to accommodate audience members’ access needs, some elements of the show WILL BE SHOUTED. Earplugs will be provided for those whose sensitive hearing finds this problematic. One member of the audience (the performers tell us) has access needs meaning they struggle in the dark, so a spotlight is shone on them. And so on.
In this way, through the familiar (and increasingly corporatised) language of access needs and disclaimers, accommodations and warnings, FlawBored leads us into a satire on the mores and morass of ablism and ‘Able Anxiety’.
They do this both through direct address in their own performance personas and in a wittily constructed narrative about the appropriation of disabled experience in service of corporate greed. Even the captioner, ‘John’, plays an increasingly pivotal role in this metatheatrical dissection of modern neuroses to do with disability.
If anything, this is perhaps a show more about non-disabled experiences than disabled ones: a lot of it deals with non-disabled people’s tendency to tie themselves in ever-tightening knots attempting not to cause offence. (There he goes, making it all about his experience…) Not for nothing does the poster image show the three company members posed within a massive steel beartrap.
But it’s also a piece that puts front and centre disability and the ways such offence-avoidance can be exploitative or plain patronising (it also, implicitly, invites us to ask which of those is worse). And the plot takes interesting twists, with a story exploring a disabled influencer who finds themselves in a position to monetise their lived experience by exploiting this phenomenon of able anxiety. It sets up these quandaries and logical contradictions breezily and with great skill.
Thought-provoking questions about disability and identity are raised, perhaps most interesting of all around the personal and the corporate—and about who has the right to claim what identities. All this with great humour and in a deadpan tone that underlines the awkwardness surrounding such debates. Director Josh Roche manages the pace and atmosphere well, and Dan Light’s video design is an integral part of the piece, putting the ‘creative’ into creative captioning.
Eli London is replacing company member Aarian Mehrabani on this tour due to illness, we’re told, and some of the captioning hasn’t kept up with this fact—but given the tricksy nature of the rest of the piece, you couldn’t quite be sure whether or not even this was a further metatheatrical twist, playing on the gender, race and disability-based identities of the performers.
As London tells us at one point, "this show is a joke," but they also reflect that whether it’s a funny one or not is open to debate. It can be a rough, wince-inducing joke at times, but the cast is engaging and skilled at audience patter, the meta japes never outstayed their welcome and the script is packed with quality punchlines as well as some squirm-inducing invitations to further debate.
It ends with yet another frame-breaking moment, directly addressing any critics that are in, that throws a challenge out to anyone making a judgement on the show. But I don’t have to give star ratings so I get away with it. The run is all but sold out in Leeds, with only a few dates at other venues left on the tour, but the company is certainly one to follow.