A dark and satirical commentary on the disability benefits regime
Don’t. Make. Tea. is a darkly funny performance, which pinpoints with ominous insight the attitudes of the state and society towards disabled people, and their experiences in trying to survive in the face of what often seems to be a heartless, anonymous bureaucracy.
The show is written by Rob Drummond, and produced by Birds of Paradise, Scotland’s leading disability theatre company.
Set in 2037, the show centres on the life of Chris (Gillian Dean), an ex-police officer with progressive muscular dystrophy, affecting her mobility and vision. Almost the entirety of the first half consists of a disability benefits interview with an auditor from DWP (Neil John Gibson), who is unrelentingly chipper in the face of Chris’ visible distress.
The performance is cleverly accessible, with audio description by Richard Conlon in the guise of ‘Able’, an AI help system provided to Chris from the government, and Emery Hunter, as the BSL interpreter, on a television screen in the flat.
This first half of the play is more dark than comedy, with the tests and questions put to Dean by Gibson increasingly cruel and callous – this is at times, excruciating to sit through. The audience feels Chris’ humiliation viscerally, a proud woman who finds herself in the horrible position of trying to prove herself worthy of help, to prove her own pain, suffering, and limitations. The government rhetoric of ‘Work Pays’, the insistence on independence as the gold standard – all of this feels unerringly like our current reality, rather than a dystopian future.
In fact even ‘Able’, the supposedly benign face of government support, proves to be gathering data down to the speed of Chris’ movements, and reporting back to the Department for Work and Pensions. This too, feels like a piercingly accurate comment on the seemingly unstoppable encroachment of big data on our lives and the right to privacy.
While the first half of this performance feels mostly depressing, the second half is where Don’t. Make. Tea. becomes brilliant, and the cast come to life. ‘Able’ explodes out of the sofa in the human form of Chris’ neighbour Eric, and Hunter climbs out of the TV screen as Chris’ dead mother, Francis. The slow, sad, set-up of the first half becomes an excellently satirical, ridiculous and genuinely funny crime cover-up, with the majority of the excellent comedic lines coming from Donlon.
The focus of this performance is razor-like, and Dean as Chris delivers some piercing analysis of society’s problem with disabled people: what do we do with them?
What is the difference between freedom and independence? How do we escape the idolisation of work under capitalism? Is going to prison sometimes better than the life the state might force upon you? Don’t. Make. Tea. asks desperately important questions, is vividly and convincingly acted, and excellently directed by Robert Softley Gale.
Make a point of going to see this one – Don’t. Make. Tea. is at Soho Theatre, running until 6th April.