FIRST SEEN at last year’s Galway Theatre Festival, where it made a big impression on audiences, Blue Teapot Theatre Company’s play Sanctuary makes a welcome and well-deserved return in the Galway Arts Festival.
Written by Christian O’Reilly, Sanctuary explores the issue of sexual and romantic relationships between people who are intellectually disabled and illuminates the subject with great tact, sensitivity, and humour.
On the margins
The play came about when Blue Teapot’s artistic director Petal Pilley contacted O’Reilly with a view to commissioning a play that explored intimate relations and sexuality in the world of people with ID.
“Petal was keen for me to get to know the actors,” O’Reilly tells me, “so I came along to Blue Teapot for a series of workshops and conversations. I got to know them as both actors and people which gave me great scope in writing their characters.
“The conversations we had enabled me to learn about their world both in general terms and as regards the specific subject of the play. People were very open, frank, and honest in their conversations which really gave me the material for the play. Their lives are the bricks and mortars of Sanctuary.”
Recalling the success of the play’s first run, O’Reilly is full of praise for the cast.
“People were very moved by the performances,” he says. “The fact that it was about the actors’ own world gave it a power it otherwise wouldn’t have had. The cast members showed a lot of courage, both in the frankness with which they told their stories and also in their performances which were very brave, vulnerable, human, and funny.
“They are conscious of being in the margins as a group and this was something that enabled them to step out of the margins and say ‘This is who I am and this is something I want to express’. I don’t know how they did it; given the nature of their disabilities it’s more of a struggle for them to learn their lines so they had to work that much harder to get through it. And they still had the pressure of having to go in front of an audience. Yet they all took that challenge on and worked and worked and worked. I’ve never seen a group of actors work so hard.”
Love and sex
The play’s two central performances come from Kieran Coppinger and Charlene Kelly, who play the couple at the heart of the story. Mervue man Kieran, from Mervue, has been a member of Blue Teapot for nine years while Charlene, from near Merlin Park, joined the company in 2007.
“The play is about these two people, Larry and Sophie, and they want time to be alone properly,” Kieran explains during a break in rehearsals. “The story the play tells is true to things we find in our own lives. Larry and Sophie both have disabilities as we do in life as well.
“They try to be properly alone but it’s not easy. During a group outing to the cinema, their careworker takes them to a hotel so they can have some time alone. Without giving the story away, things get a bit tense after that!”
Charlene adds: “The play explores relationships and sexuality. We haven’t been in the arts festival before so it’s something different for us and we’re hoping to do the play really well. We already played in New Ross, in Wexford and we had 300 people come to see it there, it was sold out.”
Both Coppinger and Kelly turn in warm, affecting performances, as do the other seven members of the Sanctuary cast under Petal Pilley’s fine direction.
Pilley has been artistic director of Blue Teapot since September 2006. She describes what prompted her to commission Sanctuary.
“The idea for the play came about from my relationships with the actors,” she states. “First there were good working relationships and then we got to know each other. Slowly over time I became aware that 1 ), they are adults and 2 ) they all have a desire for romantic and sexual fulfilment.
“I began to see there were really limited opportunities for them to fulfil that in their lives because of the nature of them being so dependent on other people, whether that be parents or care services.
“Really simple things like sharing a group home where you might be living with six other people - how can you possibly bring somebody home? Yet that doesn’t mean they want it any less just because it is such a difficult thing to achieve. It was something I thought would be good material for a piece of theatre.”
The play addresses the subject of romantic relationships among ID people with both sensitivity and candour without ever being polemical. But does Pilley feel the restrictive rules and conventions she describes should be relaxed?
“Absolutely,” she declares. “I don’t think it’s an easy thing to do; the fact for example it’s illegal for ID people to have sex before marriage is, I think, fear-based and probably a reaction to a lot of the abuse scandals.
“I think personally it’s wrong to criminalise it for the person with intellectual disability. I can’t give answers as to how it should go but I do think it needs to be really looked at to not make it a shameful experience for someone with an ID to have sex when they’re not married.”
Big step forward
Just like her actors and everyone else in Blue Teapot, Pilley is excited about appearing at the arts festival.
“It’s great!” she enthuses. “I remember sitting in our little office in Woodlands years ago and writing on a scrappy piece of paper where the company should be going and what we should be trying to achieve and one obvious aim was to be in the Galway Arts Festival.
“But I only wanted to do that when the company was ready, it wasn’t something I wanted to push into too quickly. I wanted both the actors and the people in the company to be in the right place to be able to do justice to everyone and I think we’re there now.
“We’re also going to Dublin Fringe Festival in September as well and that’s really exciting. It’s our first time playing in Dublin. When we did the play first last year I had no idea that it would come back at all, let alone be invited to two major festivals.”
Blue Teapot are well primed to wow whole new audiences with Sanctuary. It runs at the company’s Munster Avenue theatre (formerly Silke’s fruit and veg shop ) from Wednesday July 17 to Saturday 20th at 7pm nightly, and again the following week from Wednesday 24 to Saturday 27. Go see!
Tickets are available through www.galwayartsfestival.com and the Festival Box Office, Galway Tourist Office, Forster Street.
