You must be jesting

Historic Hampton Court Palace played host to a show which gave a new twist to “Playing the fool”. Michael Shamash reports

The role of the disabled performer can be a contentious one. There is the discussion about the authenticity of the performers; can disabled people be played by the non-disabled? Do we just watch reverentially or can we engage critically? We’re unused to seeing a disabled performer have a leading role on the stage and our responses mirror our unease.

Yet, this was not always so, as a production that took place recently at the Palace in Hampton Court has made very apparent.

All the King’s Fools   performed by a group of actors with learning disabilities under the guidance of Peet Cooper, a professional jester, aims to chronicle the central place people with learning disabilities played in the court of Tudor England and on the stage.

Peet realised that there was clearly an unwritten history of the role of the fool and jester waiting to be reclaimed. The fool had a pre-eminent role, both providing entertainment to the monarch but also acting as a commentary on the foibles of the time. He wanted to dispel the idea that people with learning disabilities existed somewhere between humanity and pets.

He worked with a variety of theatre companies for people with learning disabilities namely The Misfits and Firebird Theatre; Mind the Gap in Bradford, the Lawn Mowers in Gateshead and the Strathcona Company in London. He organised a series of workshops with participants exploring the themes that emerged and how they could be realised in performance.

From this initial exploration of the themes that would emerge in the actual performance, a group of the players then went to Hampton Court to see for themselves the backdrop of this history and to try on costumes of the Tudor era.  With this knowledge Peet and the performers would develop the gist of the commissioned piece.

Major assistance in examining the historical reality of life for people with learning disabilities was provided by Dr. Suzannah Lipscomb, the research curator at Hampton Court. She ferreted through state papers, records of the Privy Purse, wardrobe records and literature of the time to try and uncover a true picture.

The prime example of the fool was Will Somers, who was also a confidante of King Henry VIII.

There was a supposed sub-division between natural fools who did have a learning disability and artificial fools who feigned intellectual impairment for purely comic intent. Will Somers, it became clear, was a natural fool.

He had a keeper, a forerunner of support staff and had a budget to provide him with clothes of a high quality. What Suzannah wants to emerge from the performance is to disprove the idea that the wit and wisdoms of the fools and people with learning disability is a myth and that the repartee of someone like Will Somers was beyond the ability of people with learning disabilities.

When I spoke to Suzannah, she felt that whilst contemporary labelling can be useful in defining the level of impairment and disability it can also act as a means of sidelining people. In Tudor times people who were different were felt to have a special connection to the divine and consequently were worthy of respect. It is a kind of pre-modern concept of diversity. She made it very clear that she was not presenting some bygone rose-tinted utopia for people with learning difficulties but equally to suggest that the past was unequivocally awful is incorrect.  

Suzannah would like the performance to highlight more positive aspects of the past history of disabled people in Britain and simultaneously to show the skills and attributes of contemporary actors with learning disabilities. She organised trips with the participants to the British Library to examine the written evidence of the time and this has made the history of this period fly off the page.

From this has emerged a vivid and different piece of drama based on researched material from the time. The exciting performance breaks from the lute playing or jousting that makes up so much heritage performance. Learning disabled performers give a sophisticated depiction of this era and an audience is given an opportunity to engage with the world of the learning disabled past and present.