Eddie Redmayne has added an Oscar nomination for best actor to his Golden Globe for his performance as Stephen Hawking. It is so entrancing and persuasive that the word compelling feels like a limp understatement. All the same, ripples of controversy have spread over the casting of a rather exceptionally abled man to play someone severely disabled. It’s justified because the storyline depends on the trajectory of his brilliant career from party-loving PhD student to severely disabled yet globally renowned cosmologist unable even to speak but still unmistakably Stephen Hawking. Obviously the film would need to start later in the narrative for the part to work with a disabled actor. Maybe the producers thought it would jeopardise the triumph of the human spirit over adversity theme. All the same, Frances Ryan, whosearticle arguing that “cripping up” will one day be seen to be as wrong as blacking up – which brought a storm of abuse – made some fair points.
It would be a big mistake to take The Theory of Everything as a user’s guide to living with motor neurone disease. The film hints at the scale of the challenge that faced Hawking’s wife as the disease crept inexorably into him. But it ends up leaving the impression that otherwise it is a matter mainly of the inconvenience of being a wheelchair user with no muscle power, wretched but still heroic. The truth is altogether physically and intellectually more frustrating, messier and far less dignified than Redmayne is allowed to convey.
For a man as ferociously intelligent, quick and gregarious as Hawking, the complete inability to interact normally must be a catastrophe. The film leaves the grim reality of managing the most normal daily functions a complete blank. That is something of a betrayal, for those who know him say Hawking himself delights in company and sees no need to hide the complications of, say, eating that are part of his daily life.
Hope springs
The brilliant play Hope, by Jack Thorne, finished its short run at the Royal Court theatre in London last week. It is a bleak but devastatingly funny account – including a painfully appropriate jibe at the leader line of this newspaper – of the dilemmas faced by Labour councillors running a northern town that has to make £22bn of cuts. The whole cast is superb, including Jo Eastwood, the learning-disabled actor who plays Laura, a woman with Down’s syndrome whose day centre is top of the list of vulnerable projects.
After RJ Mitte in Breaking Bad, maybe I shouldn’t have been taken aback to see a learning-disabled actor in a live performance. Eastwood was spot on, the heart of a play that could have been so smart that the pain got lost. Her relationship with Gina (Christine Entwisle), the woman fighting to keep the day centre open, is intensely moving. And having seen her performance it is impossible to imagine her role being played by someone “cripping up”. Maybe it’s time for a remake of My Left Foot.
Isolated by pity
Going out and about with someone with a disability soon gets rid of any sense of complacency about things changing. Quite apart from the endless physical barriers, some of them quite newly installed despite the strictures of the Equalities Act, disabled people are often isolated by the embarrassment of the rest of us.
A recent holiday with a part of the extended family, a woman and her partner who are both little people (their term), got funnier and funnier, and not only because they were such good company.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/15/reality-of-being-stephen-hawking-eddie-redmayne-theory-of-everything
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