I am an example of the kind of lazy thinker that writer/performer Amy Trigg and other disabled people have encountered all their lives.
As much as I was looking forward to returning to Kiln Theatre after a year of pandemic-induced theatre drought, I admit there is a limit to how excited I generally get about the prospect of a monologue. Granted, there are some mesmerising single person shows out there as proved by Bridge Theatre’s A German Life and its entire season of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads last year. But when it comes to one-dimensional, dramatically inert theatre the monologue is, shall we say, well represented.
Add to this my expectation that a memoir about disability is bound to be of the misery kind and I’ve set myself up perfectly to have my nose rubbed in my own lazy assumptions. Because you could not hope for a more life-affirming evening to herald theatre’s return than Trigg’s fizzing one woman show, her debut.
She plays Juno who like Trigg herself has been in a wheelchair since the age of eight because of spina bifida. The disease informs every aspect of Juno’s life we learn, though often because of the way able-bodied people think of her.
