Focus on: My Left / Right Foot – The Musical

When Daniel Day-Lewis won the Academy Award for his performance in Jim Sheridan’s 1989 heartstring-tugger My Left Foot, it cemented the British-Irish thespian as a method actor par excellence. Based on the true-life story of Christy Brown, a man born with cerebral palsy so severe it limited his movement to the titular appendage, the film offered Day-Lewis a steep challenge: to convincingly portray a disabled man.

The New York Times called his performance “exemplary”. The casting choice went unchallenged; Day-Lewis, a pro, nailed the role. But flash forward to James Marsh’s 2014 Steven Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything, and the conversation’s changed. Eddie Redmayne may have won the same award as Day-Lewis for his depiction of the physicist’s battle with ALS, but there have been big questions around able-bodied actors depicting disabilities.

Robert Softley Gale, artistic director of esteemed Scottish theatre-makers Birds of Paradise, seeks to wryly explore this issue in My Left / Right Foot. A co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland, this new musical imagines the minefield of inclusion through the lens of an amateur dramatics company staging My Left Foot and trying to score points for diversity “to win the local play festival”.

The irreverence is palpable: a disability-led company famed for overtly accessible, taboo-breaking work will be intimately familiar with the pitfalls of diversity quotas and the ingrained prejudices around disability.

But that’s the point. Sometimes it takes someone like Softley Gale to bring that conversation to the fore and defuse the inevitable tensions that surround it. And in the show, “they get it all wrong”, he says. It’s not preachy – it’s comedy.

2018 also marks the 25th anniversary of Birds of Paradise. 25 years ago—not long after My Left Foot’s Oscar buzz—the terrain was very different. This production simply “wouldn’t have worked”, the director imagines, “because people’s attitudes are not where they are now.”

We’ve certainly made progress since. “The fact that I am where I am, I’m making a co-production with the National Theatre, I’m artistic director of a company; it’s a step forward,” he agrees.

But there’s still a long way to go. "It’s fine for me to direct with a company that talks about disability – that’s what I’m ‘allowed’ to do,” Softley Gale posits. “At some point I’ll want to make work that might not be about disability. Are we ready for that yet?"

Attitudes won’t change overnight. “I’m not the expert here,” he stresses. “I don’t know how to fix all of this. But if we can have more conversations, if we can talk about why it might be offensive and what that’s about, then we can look at a way forward.”

It will take the combined efforts of many people and organisations. He cites artists like Jess Thom from Touretteshero, Nicola Miles-Wildin and Claire Cunningham: “There are some excellent disabled artists in the UK who are making work that tries to ask questions about what we’re doing.”

And it’s less of a black-and-white issue than some defenders of accessibility might think. “At first glance it’s quite simple, that we say Daniel Day-Lewis was wrong to do the part. It should’ve been a disabled actor. But actually it’s more complex than that.

“At some point even I think, ‘He was a great actor, so maybe he was the right person for that part!’ I mean, I don’t believe that really, but there’s a conversation to be had: what is acting about? What is it to have disabled people in our culture?”

And that conversation, though complex, doesn’t need to be a dull one. “This is a musical comedy, so why don’t we have fun while we’re asking a lot of quite important questions?”