Interview: Access For All

FlawBored on It’s A Motherf**king Pleasure

[Note: This interview was carried out as part of our Vault Festival coverage. The show has since announced an extended run at Soho Theatre, tickets can be found here.]

Disability-led theatre company FlawBored certainly aren’t afraid of a statement show title are they! It certainly makes you sit up and take notice. So much so that we couldn’t resist grabbing some time with company co-founders Samuel Brewer, Chloe Palmer and Aarian Mehrabani to ask them more about that title, and more importantly, about how well we’re doing when it comes to making theatre more access friendly.

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We can’t not start by saying it’s a mother**king pleasure to meet you all, shall we do introductions?

it’s a motherf**king pleasure to meet you!

We’re FlawBored – Samuel Brewer, Chloe Palmer and Aarian Mehrabani – and we’re the writers and performers of It’s a MotherF**king Pleasure.

 And what is the show about then?

The show is an irreverent, dark comedy that pokes fun at the knots we tie ourselves into trying to do “the right thing” when it comes to access.

Blind talent manager Tim desperately tries to make disability the next cultural cachet and he thinks he might have just hit the jackpot with blind influencer Ross; a satire of the monetisation of identity politics. 

It is quite the title, did you never worry about using an expletive at all and how it might affect how people would talk about the show?

F*** no. People have really responded to the title and it’s a reflection of the irreverent nature of the show. For some reason… i’m not sure why…. apparently people like seeing the phrase motherf**king… Maybe it’s an Oedipus thing.

With two of the co-founders of FlawBored being Vision Impaired, have you tapped into your experience whilst making the show?

Sam: I think it’s hard to say our experience, because I don’t think this is a show about our personal lived experience, there’s still experiences in a political sense but it’s definitely not a show that taps into our own trauma. We take the piss out of liberal identity politics that are individual focussed and not interested in systemic change.

Aarian: It’s obviously going to play a part, as would Chloe’s identity as a woman, my identity as Iranian, Sam’s identity as an asshole. It’s hard to separate the work from the individual.

There’s expectancy that art has to be about an issue, or a person’s lived experience. We did continue to have conversations about our experiences of ableism, some informed parts of the writing process but we never set out to make a show entirely based on that.

You’re a disabled-led theatre company, so whilst the show focuses on access for blind, are you tackling more than just the difficulties for those with visual impairments?

Yes, we wanted to draw attention to people like Chloe who have weird belly buttons so we’re forcing audiences to get crappy belly button piercings in solidarity throughout the show…

But in regards to access… Whilst developing the show, we realised it’s incredibly difficult to make a show that’s accessible for everybody. Indeed, rather naively we set out to rise to the challenge and quickly failed. The concept of a fully accessible show for every member of the audience is extremely difficult. The only way you can do that is if you ask for individual specific access needs, and that’s everyone, not just disabled people. So by virtue of trying to make a show fully accessible in that sense, you will often find yourself tied in knots; one person’s access needs could completely contradict others. One person might need bright light to focus on a show whilst another might need the lights dimmer.

We’ve put these ‘access loopholes’ front and centre of It’s a Motherf**king Pleasure. That being said the show is audio described and captioned.

How difficult is it for disabled theatre makers still? What hurdles have you had to get over to even begin to put a show on?

SAM: One of the reason’s why FlawBored exists is because Aarian and I have always been treated as disabled actors and disabled theatre makers in non-disabled spaces. We have to prove ourselves to show that we are competent. Intellectually we all like to think that we have a certain level of ‘wokeness’ but in practicality we all have unconscious biases. People are often scared or uncomfortable to work with us.

One of the big goals for us was creating a shared space for disabled and non-disabled performers and creatives so people aren’t scared to work with us. Access is easy if you care.

Whilst theatres are doing a lot to tackle access issues, do you feel that they could do more? And is it equally as difficult for creatives and audiences alike – obviously we only see it from the audience side of things?

There’s a big shift in the industry happening at the moment where theatre is being made accessible for audiences, through captioning, audio description and relaxed performances, ticketing schemes. Which is great. However, more often than not, theatres are engaging disabled, D/deaf and Neurodivergent performers without proper access provisions and support. Ie. Programming disabled artists but not having adequate wheelchair accessible facilities. This was highlighted recently by Jamie Hale (of CRIPtic)’s experience. You can read their statement here.

I think it’s also important ro remember that just because you have one BSL interpreted show out of a two week run or a matinee performance audio describes – hey that’s great, but also remember, don’t give yourself a round of applause, there’s a lot more that needs to be done. Keep going.

What would be the first thing you would change then if you were given the opportunity?

Sam: Human accelerated climate change. 

We’d love to see theatres engaging and embracing a wider spectrum of access needs as currently we feel some are being priristised over others by their perceived ‘easiness’. Again, don’t just do one accessible show, also stop saying a show is fully accessible, you don’t know what that means. Fully accessible implies that you understand the needs of every single person in that room, unless you’re MI5 and have access to every person’s medical history and background you’re not going to know. Stop pretending and be clear. Or you can hire myself or Aarian to come in and give you three days of access training for the small price of only £300 per day, it’s a bargain trust me, and we can do mates rates. Just be clear about what you’re doing in terms of your access so people know if your show or work is for them.

Judging by your show publicity, The Vaults isn’t perfectly accessible for audiences, and we can imagine it can’t be the easiest of places to do lots of work, so how good are they doing and have they tried extra hard for you?

Sam: Yeah they’ve been great, Firstly, any space you go into as a disabled person in a predominately non-disabled space (which is pretty much all of them, and yes that’s not hyperbole) is going to be difficult. There are things that won’t be considered because people don’t know. I think Vaults is trying to speak to their FOH staff who always seem to want to learn and are really engaged, but like any human being they haven’t met every person who exists on the planet and they can’t predict the small things I or Aarian or Chloe might need for themselves individually. What they are doing which is cool is encouraging non-disabled led work to have accessible performances, be it one of their shows being audio-described or one of the performances being captioned.

THAT BEING SAID, it’s important to note that there’s disabled led work on which is doing this their whole slot (show’s like Surfacing by Asylum Arts and our own) and we don’t need to be encouraged. We know we’ve gotta do it, because if we won’t no one else will.

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Massive thanks to Sam, Chloe and Aarian for taking time out of rehearsals to chat about their show and giving us an insight into why we still have some way to go with ensuring access.

It’s A Motherf**king Pleasure played origionally as part of VAULT Festival 2023. The show will next be playing at Soho Theatre from 24 April to 13 May. Further information and bookings can be found here.