The Babydoll Project 13th - 15th January - Project, Dublin

Suzybie

Baby Doll Productions and Arts & Disability Ireland
present

THE BABY DOLL PROJECT
By Rosaleen McDonagh
Directed by Vici Wreford-Sinnott

A diva with a disability. Fluff, flare and attitude, the Baby Doll Project is a comical piece with a dark and pointed history. A Traveller denying she’s a Traveller, a woman pretending she is a doll and an alter-ego the size of a bathroom that wants to buy every lotion and potion from Brown Thomas. Baby Doll thinks culture is about cosmetics and politics about parties, she is kitsch, always the pretentious princess and at times powerful, caught between two sets of experiences that collide. The doll becomes a woman, the ego is shaken and unravels a story of female aesthetics, isolation, abuse and racism.

A time-bomb is ticking in Baby Doll’s bathroom but will she replant it where it belongs - under the surface of institutional care and racism in Holy Catholic Ireland – or will she take the brunt of the blast herself?

The piece was mentored and is directed by Vici Wreford-Sinnott. Baby Doll is written and performed by Rosaleen McDonagh, an accomplished academic, activist, Seanad Candidate and member of the Disability Cabaret Movement. She is a woman from the travelling community with a significant disability.

The piece premiered in Project as a sell-out work in progress in early November, was presented at The Dis/Cover National Festival to a standing ovation, and returns in sharper focus to Project in January 2003.

13,14,15 January @ 8pm. Tickets E10/5 concessions
Project Arts Centre, 39 Essex Street East, Temple Bar.
Bookings/Reservations : 01 881 9613/ 01 881 9614

Talliesin

Sounds very interesting, though no doubt it will be yet another play I don't manage to make it to

What's Project like as a venue?

Suzybie

Its not a bad venue at all, much improved in its refit and actually the great thing is a very supportive staff especially to a small new company with few resources.

Its good in terms of access for people with disabilities too.

Although as a friend of the performer/writer I am bound to be biased I do think this work should be seen by as many as possible. Its very rare for a woman's story of institutional life/racism etc to be told and the musical interludes, humour and set are fab.


Suzy

Talliesin

Damn!
Wonder into the Theatre board and suddenly remember about this play again.

Missed it

Suzybie

there was a great review in the Irish Times so you can kick yourself further about missing it!!!


Irish times 15/01/2003


The Baby Doll Project, The Project: Recently, several performers with disabilities have risen to modest prominence. British actor Mat Fraser, who has flippers for arms, has toured a successful show, Seal Boy, and in comedy, Philip Patson and Francesca Martinez, both in wheelchairs, and Alex Valdez, blind, have found much to laugh at in their plight, and society's attitude to it.

Rosaleen McDonagh, who has cerebral palsy, brings a uniquely Irish dimension to her story of wheelchair life because she is also from the travelling community. She brings to mind Sammy Davis Jr's response when he was asked on the golf course about his handicap: "I'm a one-eyed Jewish negro - what's yours?"

McDonagh defies you to see her as a victim. The pitiful details of her early life in and out of institutions and day-care centres are not presented tear-jerkingly but as a necessary prelude to her inevitable politicisation. Now, she says, after years of various therapies, all she's interested in is retail therapy.

As a child she knew she was being disrespected and patronised, and a streak of stubbornness hardened: at speech classes she refused to talk because she sensed the teachers wanted to eliminate her traveller accent. Other girls called her a smelly knacker, and while times have changed, as she pertly observes, political correctness has not yet reached the stage where Hello! magazine does a colour spread on travellers' bathrooms.

Baby Doll was McDonagh's pet name, and her story is told in her "special place" - the garish and kitschy bathroom where she can fantasise about another Baby Doll, a ridiculous alter ego something like a superpowered Avon Lady. She trundles around the stage, to country music or, movingly, The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, telling her anecdotes with immense good humour, although her black eyes glitter with rage when she tells the story of another girl who had excrement smeared on her face after soiling herself: "They rubbed her nose in it - isn't that what they do to train animals?"

The Baby Doll Project, directed by Vici Wreford-Sinnott, has gaps in the narrative (McDonagh's astonishing leap from halting site to an MA in Ethnic and Racial Studies isn't adequately explained) but is nevertheless an often very funny show from a new voice that deserves to be heard.

The next stage in the empowerment of performers with disabilities has to be an unselfconscious integration into mainstream entertainment: we see people in wheelchairs every day - when are we going to see them in The Queen Vic, The Rover's Return and McCoy's in Carrigstown?

The Baby Doll Project ends tonight

Stephen Dixon