Shamed in the Guardian Newspaper

What do you do, as the survivor of depression and an eating disorder, when another survivor, one with a bigger profile, better connections, more followers and a Guardian column, body-shames and art-shames you in an article designed to sell his new book of memoirs? 

I did feel shamed. I feel shamed right now. I sit at the table in my house in Belfast on a sunny day, looking out into my smallish garden with his words ‘bulbous Canadian’ echoing around in my head.

But I would also like to apologise on behalf of our industry. It is rough.  On us all.

Tomorrow is my 54th birthday.

Yesterday I was marching in support of the School Strike for Climate.  

That’s when I found out.  What?  That something had been said about me in the Guardian by someone I didn’t know.  I wasn’t in the UK on the 20th of July when the article appeared.  I have an 84 year-old mother in Quebec.  I was with her, and being there was a full time job, so I wasn’t reading much.

A respected arts colleague spoke to me at yesterday’s Climate March in the glorious sunshine.  Someone I haven’t seen in a few months. 

‘There’s an article about you in the Guardian’ she said.  ‘An actor at a low point uses you as an example.  A terrible audition.  Vagina puppets.’ Vagina puppets? Yes, that was probably me.  

Back in 2012, I had spent over two years carefully interviewing people living in Northern Ireland about their sexuality. I had built installations where people could provide anonymous feedback about sexuality using the Kama Sutra as a prompt.  I had explored the Kama Sutra as one of three sacred books in Hindu Culture.  We used a French translation as I remember. It was better.  Unabridged. We worked in Belfast with Abhishek Thapar, a theatre colleague from Puna, India.  He provided context, counter-checked what we were doing and joined the Canadian, Cornish, Northern Irish, Spanish mix of people working on the show.

Sexuality was a hotly contested topic in Northern Ireland in those days, with rampant homophobia, draconian anti-abortion laws and high suicide rates.  It still is. But it was worse then. The team working on then Ulster Kama Sutra with me were all clear that Northern Irish attitudes to sexuality were hurting everyone who lived here.  Our research and time with Abhishek also highlighted echos in India, but we knew: this was going to be a piece of work for Northern Ireland. We would use puppets to keep things safe, and we would use humour, and satire to make our point.

We laughed about how many euphemisms we were learning for sexuality, sexual function and the sexual parts of the body.  It seemed both glorious and sad.  And the misconceptions about other cultures…  In 2011, Northern Ireland was a society in which only 220,000 people were foreign born; apparently about 60% of the population still went to church every Sunday. 

We tested our ideas out in Belfast’s 2012 Cathedral Quarter Festival.  Great feedback, some outrage: we were the sellout runaway success of the Festival, but we felt that maybe the piece now called the Ulster Kama Sutra had become too Irish. It was loosing its interculturality.

Abhisheck could not come back to join us - he was setting up a theatre programme in Puna. I felt we had to have an East Asian colleague working on the show, it wouldn’t be quite right to go forward without that input.  Rewrites were needed. More devising.  We auditioned like mad but no professional actors of East Asian descent were to be found in Northern Ireland.

We had managed to squeeze some project money out of the Arts Council: for development, rehearsal, production, a tour. Some regional venues, especially those funded by local government were refusing to take the tour.  Too risky they said. But a tour was coming together.  It seemed worth pressing onwards.

Christine, a friend who was working at the BBC, offered to help book London auditions.  Maybe we could find an actor there? Money was tight, but I felt it was important.  A friendly casting director at Soho Theatre helped put the word out.  I built pages on the website to explain the development of the show, circulated papers with a description of what was involved, brought photos of the puppets.  We were using three types: full sized puppets modelled on the actors, sock puppets and little crocheted genitalia.  People loved those.  Their woolly nature made everyone smile. so you could talk about even the most painful topics using them.  

For actors auditioning, puppet experience wasn’t strictly necessary, but people needed to understand the basic concept of animating a creature that was not themselves: masque work, even commedia dell’arte would help.

Then the venue we wanted to use for the auditions fell through.  Somebody suggested the Camden People’s Theatre.  It was a bit grim, but it had a long an honourable tradition of left wing engagement so I thought it might be ok.

Having worked as an actor myself for many years, I’ve always tried to run auditions as fairly and respectfully as possible.  Lay out materials for actors to read before hand, explain what it is that you want, tell them up front about the money and tour and topic, and why you’re working on what you’re working on.  I remember we made a tiny little area with two chairs and some info, photos of the puppets, material about the company, just outside the door to that rather dark low-ceilinged ground floor room in North London that we had to audition in.  We’d just finished three years of work in Macau, a year in Hong Kong, time in Tehran in January 2009 and I was proud of that work, and wanted auditionees to know about it.

Christine is an Auzzie, very high up in HR but a bit shy.  Having her help was lovely.

I only had one day in London and there were three key things I needed to find out in the 20 minutes we had for each audition.  Could they act, when allowed to choose their own piece? Could they understand that puppetting is about channeling acting and reactions into a puppet on your own hand? Did they enjoy comedy?

I remember one actor who got the part working with a sock from his own laundry, making it come alive as the most delightful witty and challenging character.

I also remember wanting to communicate my love of all aspects of physical theatre, mask, clowning.  I certainly felt that after more than 20 years working in the UK had a right to be in London.  Auditioning. Even if the room was a dingy. If I was kind, straight forward and respectful, I would be met with kindness, straight forwardness and respect.

I decided I would meet actors for 20 minutes.  Usually it was 10 in the business.  Twenty minutes felt like a bit of luxury. I would be a specific as possible before hand, so that people would know exactly what I needed to see.  I would ensure they wouldn’t waste their time or mine if this job wasn’t for them.

By the time I found myself in that audition room, I had set up and run two companies, line-produced in the West End, run an English rep theatre, run an Irish regional theatre, set up a producing consortium, taken seven shows to Edinburgh, written, directed, produced up and down the country.  At one point in the 90s a show sponsor had gone bankrupt and I had spent three years personally working off a £14,000 company overdraft. I was a respected freelance director and playwright. I had been commissioned for TV, for radio, and fought my way through depression and the death of my beloved father.  I had met and married an Irish musician.  With his help I had beaten an vicious eating disorder. I had worked all over the world, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Iran, China, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, all across England, Scotland and Wales, all across London. I had established myself in Belfast.

I didn’t think of myself as the article describes me: not bulbous, or breathless. I don’t think I’ve ever said ‘coo-ee’ to anyone in my life. I didn’t think my Canadian accent was inferior because I’ve never judged anyone for their accent in English.   I knew that it was acceptable to be casually racist about ‘fat Americans’ in London, because in my 12 years there I’d heard plenty of those kind of remarks, but I didn’t think they applied to me.

I speak two languages fluently, with smatterings of several more.  I was born in Delhi, grew up in Bangkok, Jakarta, Geneva; I’m a citizen of the world.  Not “a bulbous woman with a sprig of spiked hair” casually featured in a Guardian article as an ‘absurd’ example of reaching “rock bottom”.

I also don’t think that asking London actors to work in Belfast is part of ‘rock bottom absurdity’.  

The Ulster Kama Sutra tour worked out of Belfast in 2012, playing in Northern Irish regional theatres.  In his Guardian article Rhik has transformed this into ‘six venues in the West of Scotland, driving back to Cumbernauld each night’.  The West of Scotland is huge.  What sane person would organise that?  

And why Cumbernauld anyway?  Has Cumbernauld been chosen because it is "the back of beyond"?  Is the West of Scotland somehow more absurd than Belfast?  Or are they both so interchangably awful to someone from London that it doesn’t matter? London hits rock bottom, and the outer reaches of the British Isles exist only to showcase the awfulness.

For Rhik, the puppets we developed are part of the awfulness too.  Not our puppets of course, strange made-up puppets from his memory that serve to underline more awfulness.  In our show there was no playboy bunny, there was no radishes, there was no Hitler, although there was a puppet version of our actor colleague John, as there was of each actor, who happens to have short dark hair and glasses.  There was no one called Esmerelda.  There never was.  There were three crocheted vaginas, developed with the help of the ladies of Belfast’s Indian community centre, and the Belfast Lesbian support network and various other groups, each about the size of a teacup and saucer.

Wouldn’t you be charmed by those?  Doesn’t the idea of little crocheted vaginas (one even had reading glasses) conjure up adorable images of the WI, and jam, and needing considerably bigger buns?  They were created to be fun and feminist, and they came in different skin tones.

In the audition I spoke quickly about the challenges of working interculturally around sexuality in Northern Ireland. I struggled to help the actors challenge the texts they had chosen. I taught actor after actor the rudiments of puppetry in just a few moments. I tried to have fun. I shared the development work I had done, the hilarity of euphemisms I had run into, the gentleness we had to find to handle shame wherever we met it.

But in Rhik’s Guardian piece I am just part of the awfulness, I ‘burble’, ‘yelp’ and then ultimately I ‘coo’ the genital euphemism that always entertained and saddened me when I ran into it in workshops: ‘the lady garden’.  I am served up as the fun object of contempt to showcase how far Rhik Samadder has fallen: to my bulbous, cooing, Canadian, lady-gardening level.

That was tough to read.  And it was tough to know that it is out there to be read by colleagues in London, Belfast and beyond.  I’m pretty identifiable.  I’ve been told that if you google ‘vulva puppets’ you  get me.  So this is me pointing it out before anyone else stumbles on it.  I'm taking the bull by the horns.

And the sun is still shining outside the window.  Yesterday’s climate march seemed like a success.  And you know what? So was that tour of the Ulster Kama Sutra that Rhik didn’t get cast in.  

The crocheted vagina puppets have gone on to star in a world-wide ad campaign for sanitary products, aiming to make women more comfortable with their bodies and menstruation.

In the years since Rhik’s audition I’ve worked with numerous professional visible minority actors, mentored those seeking to enter the profession, engaged with thousands of community participants, run programmes to create new Irish non-white stories featuring languages other than English, represented Northern Ireland in everything from Shakespeare 400 to case studies in diversity across Europe.  Books and articles have been written about my practice from Galway to Berlin to Melbourne.   

But, as I read the Guardian article that sort of featured a sort of version of me, I wept and felt small.  I was humiliated.  I had to pick myself up from that humiliation and think about what it meant.  

What I want to say is: ‘Rhik, if I somehow contributed to making you feel humiliated in that room in North London all those years ago, I am sorry.  It was never my intention.’  I have been knocked down and picked myself up too.  I’m sure I’ve made mistakes. I have found joy, and companionship, and overcome abuse, and shared tough times and great moments with wonderful talented colleagues.

I hope I don’t feature in your book. Even though you say you’ve turned your heart inside out to write it.

I’ve turned my heart inside out too.

You can read Rhik's article about reaching rock bottom here https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/jul/20/rhik-samadder-confessions-of-a-failed-actor