BBC star talks about disabled representation in theatre

Blackpool Gazette

The star of BBC1 drama, Better, shares his experience as a disabled actor and why he found his latest role impossible to resist.  Zak Ford-Williams stars in a new version of the Elephant Man, which puts a very different spin on the well-loved classic.   He's joined by Stephanie Sirr, the Chief Executive of Nottingham Theatre - who says the play is a positive reflection of how attitudes to disabled people have changed since the '80s.

Transcript

00:00 There's a lot of plays about disability, particularly if they're written by a non-disabled writer,

00:04 that don't quite hit the mark sometimes, you know?

00:09 And this was one of those rare instances.

00:11 Tom Wright, an amazing writer, is non-disabled, but he just understood it.

00:18 I remember me and Stephen talked about this.

00:22 It's like someone just gets what it's like while still making this brilliant, entertaining,

00:31 you know, devastating play.

00:34 Sometimes when you read a script as an actor, you get a lot of scripts through, and a lot

00:38 of them are very good, but there's the occasional one that really captures your imagination,

00:43 and that was one of these.

00:45 I couldn't stop thinking about Anne.

00:47 I couldn't stop thinking about Joseph and the way this tells his story, and the way

00:50 it's different from any other version I've ever seen, in a really positive way.

00:57 So usually, the film, the famous John Hurt film, which is fantastic, the story is kind

01:03 of more about Treves, about the Doctor, about his genius and his friendship and his support,

01:10 but actually it makes it all really rather medical.

01:12 And these days, when we're meeting disabled characters, we're not really interested in

01:17 the medical side of it, we're interested in them as people.

01:19 So I think that's a big step, and I think if anything that underlines how far we've

01:22 come actually, that actually we're not trying to cure people, fix people, talk about their

01:26 medical side, that's just what it is.

01:28 We're talking about their lives, their likes, their loves, their pressures, you know, the

01:32 conflict that you have in any drama.

01:34 So that for me feels like the big step from the film of the 1980s to where we are now.

01:39 So how important was it to cast a disabled actor in this role?

01:45 We wouldn't have done it if we couldn't have cast a disabled actor.

01:49 Fortunately, there are so many fantastic disabled actors.

01:53 I think if you go back a few years, people thought that it was a thing that actors did,

01:59 they played their disabled characters.

02:02 And actually, when there's so many great disabled actors, what's the point of that?

02:07 This play in particular, in the way that it properly connects to the disabled experience,

02:15 I really feel the play itself needs that.

02:21 And I just feel fortunate enough to be that actor.

02:28 But it's incredibly important.

02:33 A very exciting director called Stephen Bailey, who's a neurodivergent director, he brought

02:39 the script to us and we were interested in doing "The Elephant Man".

02:42 It was his idea with which he was awarded the Sir Peter Hall Award.

02:47 But we didn't know this version.

02:48 It's a brand new version to us, written by a very exciting Australian writer called Tom

02:52 Wright.

02:54 And we were blown away by it as a version.

02:56 It gives Joseph Merrick so much agency, so much control over his own story.

03:02 And we thought, what an interesting way of revisiting the story.

03:04 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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