No Magic Pill: ‘If you cast disabled actors, they bring with their performance the lived experience of disability’

At rehearsals for No Magic Pill, at Artane School of Music in north Dublin, the cast and crew are all sitting around a table, chatting. They usually start with a game of keepy-uppy with a small ball. “It’s about metaphorically and symbolically keeping the ball in the air,” explains the play’s director, Raymond Keane.
“And it’s about us reacting to each other in the moment,” says Peter Kearns, cast member, dramaturge and, according to Keane, disability consultant and agitator.
What are the rules? “You can’t hit the ball twice in succession,” says Keane.
“And you can’t give out to the crips,” says Kearns.
“Except for Peter,” says Ferdia MacAonghusa, another actor and wheelchair user. “You’re allowed to give out to Peter.”
“That’s my role,” says Kearns.
“The pain sponge,” says MacAonghusa.
No Magic Pill, which was written by Christian O’Reilly, and won an Irish Times Irish Theatre Award when it debuted, in 2022, is returning next week for another run. A groundbreaking production, it’s the story of O’Reilly’s late friend Martin Naughton, the disability activist. Four of its six actors are physically disabled. This is a first in Irish theatre.
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“Peter is the one we look to and defer to,” says O’Reilly. “He has an academic perspective, a lived-experience perspective and a dramaturgical perspective. Everything we’ve done, for the staging, the set design, the production, all of it has been informed by Peter.”
“It all changed when Peter came on board,” says Keane.
“Yeah, it was good until that point,” quips Kearns.
Kearns has been involved in disability arts for decades. “The idea of casting disabled actors was bound up with equality initially,” says O’Reilly. “But Peter taught me that it’s also about the aesthetics. If you cast disabled actors, they bring with their performance the lived experience of disability.”
“Having disabled actors changes the aesthetics of theatre,” says Kearns. “Instead of having a nondisabled actor acting the impairment, with a [fake] hump or a twisted leg, the disabled actor can act the character.”
Kearns suggested that for the auditions, the actors should do Richard III’s opening soliloquy. “That alone was mind-blowing,” says Keane. “The opening speech, where he’s talking about his own disability, performed by disabled people as opposed to nondisabled actors … I had never heard the Richard III speech like that before. You can’t go back after that. It was the best theatre I’d seen. The words meant so much more.”
“The Irish theatre tradition is steeped in disability,” says MacAonghusa. “It’s just not been defined by people with disabilities. From Translations to The Cripple of Inishmaan, all of these huge headline plays [featuring disabled characters] get put on without an authentic disabled voice being heard. It’s a phrase in the show, and it’s a phrase from the Independent Living Movement: ‘Nothing about us without us.’ You don’t want to be talking about people behind their back. You want the people who you’re talking about to be involved.”
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Having disabled artists’ input was also hugely important to the text of the play, says O’Reilly. What was it like before their input?
“It was too reverential,” he says. “I’d made Martin into a saintly figure. When Peter came on board he basically said, ‘Where’s the sex? Where’s the romance? Where’s the love story? You’ve got to set yourself free as a writer.’ And so I was able to write a Martin who was much more real and interesting …
“It’s the story of an over-reacher, a dreamer who has a commitment to equality but lives every day as if it was his last, because he thought when he was a young fellow that he was going to die young. He doesn’t know how to live otherwise.”
O’Reilly first met Naughton 29 years ago, when O’Reilly responded to an advertisement for a job with the Centre for Independent Living, as the Independent Living Movement was then called. Naughton was one of the centre’s founders. “I turned up at the Royal Dublin Hotel and in comes this wheelchair-user wearing a fishing hat, smoking a cigarette, who says, ‘Shake the thumb’.” He laughs.
“He saw something in me I didn’t see in myself, as he did with many, many people, disabled or not.” The job “completely shattered my perception of disability and gave me an urge afterwards to write about it”. Naughton and his group “were so funny, so militant, so passionate, so determined to change the world … I fell in with a crowd of wheelchair-users, and it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.”
Part of the reason they want to put the show on again is because they want it to have more of an impact on the wider theatre world. For Kearns, the show is a line in the sand. “We hope that, from now on, professional productions will use disabled actors for disabled characters,” says Kearns.
“And, as an extension of that, having disabled actors playing nondisabled people,” says Keane.
“Disabled actors are just actors,” says Kearns. He laughs. “And actors are a necessary evil.”
“Having disabled actors lets you get away with more,” says MacAonghusa. One of the parts he plays is a character called Albert, who “is so self-hating and has so much prejudice towards other disabled people that I would feel quite uncomfortable with a nondisabled actor playing that character. But every disabled person who talks to me is, like, ‘Oh, you play one of those guys.’ You’d be holding back if it was a nondisabled person representing someone like that, whereas I think we can take the brakes off.”
“No pun intended,” says Sorcha Curley, another of the actors.
“All my puns are intended, Sorcha,” says MacAonghusa, and they laugh.
Curley has been an actor for years but found it very hard to find roles. “There were no disabled roles for me,” she says. “I would go for roles that were not disabled, but then you have the issue of a set that’s not accessible … There are stages that I would absolutely love to be on but I would never be on, because they’re not accessible, and the buildings are so old they won’t be able to change them to make them accessible. They’re often accessible for wheelchair-users in the audience but not wheelchair actors.”
Eric Fitzgerald, who plays the part of Martin, is a newcomer to the production. He had wanted to act but had been focusing on writing instead (he made a short film called Medical Aid), “because I figured the only way that I could get myself into a role was if I wrote it myself and put myself into it … When you’re among able-bodied people you sometimes think, I don’t feel I belong. But here I feel like I’m home.”
I watch their rehearsal. The play is every bit as moving, funny and thought-provoking as I remember from its initial run. O’Reilly’s first attempt to write about Martin Naughton was the film Inside I’m Dancing, of which he’s proud but which didn’t, in the end, reflect Naughton’s story.
“I had a real sense of failure that I had let Martin down,” he says. “I didn’t get the chance to present No Magic Pill to him before he died, sadly.” Naughton died in 2016. “But his family read out a letter to him in his final days, in which I said, ‘Thanks for everything you did for me. I’ve returned to your story. I’m going to finish it, and I’m going to put it on as a play.’ I felt that was a promise I had to keep. And, fortunately, I’ve been able to keep it.”
Fitzgerald believes that channelling Naughton’s stubborn bravery and moral certainty will be good for him. “I am a very secluded individual,” he says. “I don’t want to say or do anything that draws attention to myself.” He laughs. “I do a lot of roaring in this play … It’s fun to be loud and big. It’s so out of my ballpark. I was very closed. If something wasn’t going my way – if there wasn’t a ramp there for the train – I’d say, ‘Oh well.’ But Martin would be more like, ‘Why isn’t there a ramp there? Get a ramp!’ I might do more of that from now on.”
They all hope it will demonstrate to the wider arts community the new creative possibilities and opportunities that come with disabled practitioners. Curley remembers, during their first run, in 2022, seeing a young girl in the audience in a pink wheelchair. “That was me, looking at people on stage in the Abbey or in Smock Alley, thinking, I’d love to do something like that. It was amazing she could see us up there and go, ‘I actually can do that.’”
No Magic Pill is at Black Box, Galway, from Thursday, November 7th, to Saturday, November 9th; Backstage, Longford, on November 12th and 13th; Glór, Ennis, Co Clare, on November 19th and 20th; and Civic, Tallaght, on November 22nd and 23rd