Kate Hood has known the thrill of success and the sound of silence. For two decades Sydney-born Hood was an “able-bodied actor, writer and director”, with a long-running role in the TV drama Prisoner. Then, in 2003, she was diagnosed with hereditary spastic paraplegia and became a wheelchair user. Suddenly, she says, “doors shut in my face”.
Hood, 65, slowly rebuilt her career, appearing in plays such as Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone at Melbourne Theatre Company in 2023, where she became a member of the company’s advisory circle the previous year, reminding directors of their obligation to authenticity. Along the way she gained a reputation as a fierce and effective advocate for disabled actors.
“We never see blacking up any more but we see cripping up all the time on television, film and stage,” she says. She counts herself as lucky because she trained in acting while living in New Zealand, before she acquired disability: “A person who is born with a disability has a snowflake’s chance in hell of being trained.”
Australian directors and theatre-makers increasingly acknowledge the need to cast disabled actors in disabled roles. But access impediments run deep, driven by fear and a misperception there are insufficient actors with disability to audition. (Issues of accessibility are complicated by an ongoing pandemic that continues to lock out immunocompromised creatives.)
Hood is now starring as Ani in the Australian premiere of the Pulitzer-prize winning play Cost of Living, running at the Queensland Theatre before transferring to Sydney. Like Hood, Ani’s disability came later in life: she has been left quadriplegic by an accident, and her husband, Eddie, abandoned her soon after doctors decreed she would never walk again.
The logistics of taking on the role were significant: Hood boarded a plane from her Melbourne home, travelling in a manual wheelchair, having already air-freighted two “power” wheelchairs: one for personal use, another for the stage with functions matched to her character’s disability as a “dramaturgical choice”.
This joint Queensland and Sydney theatre companies production is a lodestone for authentic disability casting because the Polish American playwright Martyna Majok insists disabled actors be cast in the key roles of Ani and John, a doctoral candidate with cerebral palsy, played here by the dancer Dan Daw. After the play’s Brisbane and Sydney runs, Melbourne Theatre Company will stage its own production.
Hood backs Majok’s ethos and says casting agencies are just beginning to seek disabled actors, “but don’t cast them very often”. She argues if more actors with disabilities were trained, more would be performing on stage and screen.
“Nida, Waapa and VCA are not taking and training quotas of disabled students. I’m talking about getting a variety of disabled people into the main course to study Chekhov and Shakespeare and do movement classes … [but] teachers there don’t know how to deal with disability.”
Hood says there should be finer discussions, too, about whether one actor with a disability can play characters with other disabilities: “Can a person with multiple sclerosis, for instance, play a person with cerebral palsy?” she asks. “Could a person who’s a non-wheelchair user play a wheelchair user?”
‘A long way to go’
The Brisbane-born actor Bridie McKim studied at Nida at the same time as landing her breakthrough role as Sabine in the ABC TV drama The Heights. Her character’s disability was unspecified until McKim was cast, later named as cerebral palsy because McKim has that disability. Nida “was incredible, brutal, intense”, says the now 26-year-old, who received the same training as everyone else.
While acknowledging many disabilities are invisible, McKim could not see others with a visible disability such as hers among her acting student contemporaries. “A few have gone through [previously], but considering we [people with disabilities] are one in five of the population, the stats don’t align,” she says.
Nida’s equity and inclusion manager, Alexia Derbas, agrees the industry has “a long way to go, but increasing accessibility for students with disability is a priority”. At Waapa, the executive dean, David Shirley, says 14% of students have a disability: “Many have felt excluded from performing arts institutions … this can’t be denied. But things are changing.” A VCA spokesperson says the college provides “supportive and inclusive auditions” but there is “more important work to be done” on campus disability access.
McKim says “in the perfect world”, where a disability is specified in a role, an actor would be matched with the same disability. “Those actors could do the best job because they would bring authentic experience,” she says. “However, there’s only so many actors with disability who have training and capacity …
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“Often, productions say, ‘We can’t find somebody with this exact disability, so we’re going to hire an actor without disability.’ That mentality is not ideal, so [actors with disability] need flexibility to play different identities, conditions and disabilities that don’t [always] align with our own experiences – but as disabled people, we’re used to thinking creatively to operate in the world.”
McKim applauds a 2022 initiative by the Casting Guild of Australia and Showcast to create a dedicated platform to showcase performers with disabilities. The casting director Angela Heesom, who led the initiative, says more than 200 performers have registered with the site. “I think the tool is working successfully as we are seeing these artists being auditioned for roles and quite a few going on to win those roles,” Heesom says.
‘You have to take an imaginative leap’
In May, after months of searching, the director Anthea Williams and the Melbourne Theatre Company team completed casting of its own production of Cost of Living, when Ani’s role was finally filled by Rachel Edmonds, an actor with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome who uses a wheelchair as well as a cane, in their main stage debut. Edmonds, a National Drama School Melbourne graduate, will join Oli Pizzey Stratford, an actor and para-athlete who sustained a spinal injury at birth that left him quadriplegic, who was cast last year as John.
Williams says about 10 actors were seen for the role of Ani after a two-month “open call audition” via the MTC website, to agents, on social media channels as well as through disability contacts. Actors needed to identify as having a disability.
“We didn’t ask them to tell us what their diagnoses were,” says Williams, who has herself lived with rheumatoid arthritis since the age of two. “We allowed people to self-identify.”
While Ani was specified as a wheelchair user, the actor could be “ambulant or not”, and those who came forward included part-time wheelchair users and those who rely on other mobility devices. A couple of past wheelchair users decided “this doesn’t feel right” and withdrew from the auditions.
Williams says more actors with marquee names should appear in productions to help boost the profiles of actors with disabilities: MTC, for instance, has cast the Mystery Road star Aaron Pedersen as Ani’s partner Eddie, who is able-bodied.
She notes that many good actors have not been formally trained – she believes the talent pool of actors with disability is significant, even as its number is unknown. Her mind is open about the range of characters a person with disability might play.
“I personally felt the experience of being a wheelchair user [to play Ani] was important, because of the social barriers that can create. But I’m also aware that, any time you’re acting, you have to take an imaginative leap.”
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Cost of Living is at Bille Brown Theatre in Brisbane until 13 July, then the Sydney Theatre Company Wharf 1 theatre 18 July to 18 August and Melbourne Theatre Company 14 September to 19 October
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