The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes by Back to Back Theatre – Battersea Arts Centre, London

Australian company Back to Back Theatre are touring the UK with their show about understanding, perception and togetherness. Seeing their work on these shores is an important and exciting experience, and it’s unlikely you’ll have seen anything like it before. This fact in itself is at the heart of the evening, because Back to Back’s performers have perceived to have learning disabilities (although the language used to group and define them is in an area of disagreement among the performers themselves). The three actors in The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes, Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring and Scott Price, have a range of different disabilities including brain injury and autism, unrelated conditions that nevertheless place them into the same box. People who do not fit our intellectual expectations are not often visible on our stages (although this year’s York Mysteries cycle provided a notable exception). A company that is driven by actors who fall into these categories is something entirely different to what we expect to see on stage. The results are a revelation, a piece of theatre that, like the best stage work, makes everything seem different afterwards.

Laherty, Mainwaring and Price convene a town meeting, set in Geelong, Victoria, with a row of plastic chairs and a speech-to-text display above. They wish to talk to us, the audience, about who we think they are and, more importantly, who we think we might be. The show reveals grim, fundamental truths about the way intellectually disabled people are abused, denied opportunity, enslaved and killed. It tells us things we really should already know, including the grim story of the way people living in the Magdalen Laundries of Ireland were forced to assemble board games for Hasbro. This is dark history, but in the hands of the performers (and their co-writers Michael Chan, Mark Deans, Bruce Gladwin and Sonia Teuben is become Beckettian theatre. Laherty and Price list games implicated in this scandal – Buckaroo, Mousetrap, Monopoly – in an increasingly surreal fashion. The patterns of speech are far removed from standard acting delivery, and draw us into a different rhythm of expectation where everything is slowed down, and people have different needs. They may, for example, need to send the rest of the cast off stage while they compose themselves, or not be able to deliver a speech in front of an audience, but it just becomes part of the way the show is delivered. No-one is in a rush, but there is plenty of discussion around what mutual respect involves.

The Siri-like subtitles are also a character in the show, sometimes misinterpreting speech and eventually getting involved in debate with the actors. Their presence is resented by the performers, who suggest with some accuracy that the real reason they might be hard to understand is not because they have disabilities, but because they are Australian. The relationship between technology and people gradually emerges as the real theme of the show. We are lulled into imagining we have been invited to see people we imagine to be ‘other’ explaining themselves but, as they point out, the technology they are obliged to use highlights their inadequacies. So how will we feel when AI develops to the point that makes everyone intellectually disabled? However hard we try, none of us will be able to catch up either, and we’ll be constantly exposed as not being good enough.

It is a stark and compelling thought. However, Back to Back have much more to offer than a lesson in schadenfreude. Their show is funny, unpredictable, clever and multi-layered. Director Bruce Gladwin has brought together something that only these performers could have produced, and it is enough to make us want not just theatre, but society, to be very different. We need to truly learn to see one another. At the end of the show the performers break into a series of very individual dances, which are a pure expression of self – real joy to be found among difficulty and doubt. The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes as a short run at the Battersea Arts Centre, then tours to Brighton, Cambridge and Leeds in early November. If you want to know about the future of theatre, you need to see this.