The much loved and respected theatre director, Patrick Sandford turns writer and performer for a gentle hour of confessional drama in which he recounts the sexual abuse he endured as a child and how it has influenced his life since.The abuse itself was comparatively low key compared to the salacious and ghoulish accounts of celebrity crimes in the press but there’s no denying the profound psychological scarring that resulted from the perpetrator’s engagement and abandonment of his young victim.
Sandford evokes the event through bold, simple storytelling, a tale made all the more vivid and nauseating by the mundane details - the abuser's pen, shoes, the colour of a carpet etc. The abuse isn’t an earth shattering event, it’s horrible because of its very ordinariness, just a few distressing encounters which, none the less, went on to wreck decades of a man’s life, leading to adult depression and an inability to form loving relationships.
But our protagonist is keen we see this as a survivor’s story. The central figure is banishing his demons through bringing all the guilty secrets into the light so that the audience can better understand the nature and effect of abuse. He has performed it to educate psychiatrists, teachers and the police and now us, the public, first at the Brighton Festival and now at the Soho Theatre.
The press night performance that I saw was followed by a question and answer session with the performer/writer and experts in the field.
The heartfelt sincerity of this project and Sandford himself almost defies you be critical but as it’s my job I'm going to admit that the definition of character in the narrative is fuzzy. I wasn’t always clear who was being portrayed from moment to moment in the first half. There’s also a sense of preaching to the choir in that I can’t imagine there was anyone in the audience who didn’t already know how horrible and pervasive child abuse was when they took their seats.
But this isn’t misery porn. It raises a number of vital questions which society has to address.
If, as is reported in the show, 1 in 7 boys and 1 in 4 girls suffer sexually at the hands of adults then we’re not dealing with an occasional and marginal flare up of cruelty. Alas, it must be as intrinsic to human nature as substance abuse and any other form of violence, yet it’s so abhorrent a subject that, even now, no one is ready to openly explore why so many adults have sex with children. I suspect that it’s only once we’re prepared to listen to both victims and abusers alike that we’ll be able find solutions.
Unfortunately the topic is still so taboo that even this brave heartfelt little presentation doesn’t dare address the wider implications of those shocking statistics. I'm very grateful that it gently raises the questions though. It’s a slight piece but it leaves you with a lot to think about.
The New York playwright and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley is known for depicting human beings at their most vulnerable whilst exploring the darkest aspects of humanity. In his 1983 play DANNY AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA Shanley tells the story of Danny and Roberta, two lonely souls who find each other in the middle of the Bronx, wrapped in their own personal tragedies and ultimately trapped by their own past, the characters find themselves yearning for a human connection.