AustLit

'The article takes as its starting point 'We will look after you', a specific utterance and theatrical moment at the end of Lady Eats Apple by Back to Back Theatre insofar as these embody the potential aesthetic and political efficacies of the narrative strategies of recent theatre involving actors with intellectual disabilities. These narratives are first located within the context of the development of such theatre over the last fifty years and then within the particular processes of development of Back to Back Theatre as a company exploring the terms of the 'distribution of the sensible' (Rancière) of intellectual disability within contemporary theatrical performance, specifically in what might be termed the narrativity of postdramatic theatre. An analysis is then offered of how Lady Eats Apple reconfigures what can be said, shown, felt and understood in such theatre through the disorientation of the senses of perception and location of the audience. The analysis concludes that the company's aesthetic approach proves to be political in 'the time after' of performance, in its reconfiguration of assumed binaries of both the construction of the self as subject and of the relationship of care and dependence between people with and without disabilities.' (Publication abstract)