Teach us to care and not to care

Lisa Hammond gets audiences thinking about disability.

The British public, long used to arbitrating on the presence or otherwise of Talent and X Factor, has now been given a say in the devising of a show. Two actors went out on to the streets with a microphone and canvassed opinion on what their forthcoming play should be about, and the resulting performance is the wryly titled No Idea. It should be stated, for the record, that one of the performers, Lisa Hammond, is what the Americans preciously call a “little person”; her partner Rachael Spence is of average height.

The pair have a knack of making each line appear box-fresh. As they present this show about a show, and road-test some of the public’s ideas, there’s an off-the-cuff feel of live improvisation which is actually more akin to the well-honed grooves of stand-up: this play has been carefully crafted, under the direction of Improbable’s Lee Simpson.

The public’s suggestions are a springboard all right, but not in the direction the public intended. In the end, the laughs are on the unsuspecting contributors, and the show turns out to be very much about them and their perceptions of Hammond and Spence. When the actors play around with gilt frames, creating objectifying snapshots of various body parts, one senses that they were not the only ones to have been “framed”.

Even as you wince, you can’t help but feel a teensy bit sorry for the hapless interviewees. Their accents and agendas alike are ruthlessly and, it must be said, hilariously nailed by the two performers. One passer-by gives them deeply patronising advice about starting out with free performances. In small spaces. Another simply can’t imagine two women doing a comedy and being funny. A group of youngsters suggest they beef up their flimsy act with big-hitters like Davina, Beyoncé or Phil from EastEnders.

And the tricksiest of all the tricksy issues is the public’s response to the pint-sized pachyderm in the room, Hammond’s disability. One assumption in particular tapped a well of frustration in Hammond, which is that an undersized person must be possessed of an outsized personality. It’s what she calls the “Uh-oh, Here Comes Trouble!” syndrome.

Cheeky girls

Notably there are comments about her “cheeky, cheeky face”, which the pair work up into a ribald music-hall number and push into the realms of savagely funny bad taste (“See the smile/of a paedophile . . .”). When, later in the show, Hammond fesses up to the misdemeanours that her condition enables her to get away with, and notes that we, the public, accept that “the freaky girl does freaky things”, we revise our laughter at her song. Would it have been bearable, let alone funny, if sung by someone of standard size?

Enthusiastic lip-service is paid to Hammond being the star of the show, but interestingly, agonisingly, when the public is asked to string a storyline together, she is given nothing whatsoever to do. It would seem we are loath to visit any kind of mishap on her, to double-dose her with misfortune. And we certainly don’t see her as a romantic lead. So while Spence frets that she’ll be cast in “some kind of ensemble capacity”, or as a “chorus tramp”, she actually gets all the action.

While she gets to do a fabulously clownish “falling in love” montage of picnics, photo-booth capers and roller-coaster rides, Hammond is given the task of staying in the apartment, making a phone call. “I observe,” she says acidly, “that I have had fuck all to do in that story.”

Though the show points up our hypocrisy and confusion with regard to the “dwarf or midget”, it is also a warm celebration of the possible relationship between able-bodied and disabled, and the friendship between Spence and Hammond is held up as an example of best practice. Teach us to care and not to care, as T S Eliot would have it, and Spence strikes pretty much that balance towards her diminutive partner, finishing the show with a rousing chorus of “I Don’t Give a Shit About You!”.

The yen towards didacticism — all that messing around with body building-blocks can feel like a theatre-in-education workshop — is playfully clocked, and the show just manages to pull back from the preachy. “We want entertaining, not cripples complaining!” larks Hammond, in the nick of time.

Crucially, I left the theatre thinking about her stature, but as a performer, not as a person. And humming “Cheeky face, cheeky face . . .”