Review: Advocacy

Advocacy

Project Arts Centre

****

Shaun Dunne’s latest work is set in the world of mental health and negotiates the challenging world of care workers and their clients, while exploring how society treats individuals with intellectual disability.

The play is loaded with the language of the sector. “Service users” are being helped towards “active citizenship” and “integration with the wider community”, and while there’s an inherent necessary neutrality, the words start to jar and accentuate the bias of a system and a society struggling to cope with those who are different.

The cast, for the most part, play the roles of both care workers and their clients as they work through roleplays that help services users cope with their daily lives. It’s a sensitive, documentary-style elucidation of just some of the manifold issues in the sector. Talking Shop’s signature style is clearly in evidence – there is repetition in script and deed, voiceovers are common, and the audience is frequently appealed to directly – and it’s all kept on a tight directorial rein. There are, of course, no easy resolutions, and the emotional payload is certainly robust enough to make an audience question its own behaviour long after the lights have come up.

Until Sept 13