Gallows humour is a time honoured way of dealing with subjects our society might otherwise prefer to ignore; its best practitioners are often the marginalised, the dispossessed and the othered. There’s something pugilistic about it, laughing at those things that would otherwise knock you down. Alistair Baldwin’s Telethon Kid draws on his experiences with an extremely rare form of muscular dystrophy to tell a dark, provocative tale of disability, medical practice and corporate funding that is funny precisely where it is dark and provocative.
Sam (William Rees) lives with a rare degenerative disease, having endured an entire childhood being poked and prodded by the medical industry. Rather than withdrawing into solitude, however, Sam has embraced the limelight, becoming something of a minor television celebrity via the 2007 Perth Children’s hospital telethon. Parlaying this exposure into a career of sorts as an openly gay disability influencer, he comes of age ready to party.
It is a worthy endeavour, and Baldwin convincingly frames Sam’s desires as expressions of body positivity and queer empowerment. Good things. That he chooses to do so with his former paediatrician, at a pharmaceutical conference that could award them a huge research grant, one that would go a long way to funding a cure for his rare condition? Not so good.
His doc (Max Brown) understands just how transgressive it is to have sex with a patient he’s known since childhood, but Sam’s very adult need to show agency, to sexualise and therefore perhaps invert the relationship that saw his body as a thing of fascination and study, wins the day.
These early sex scenes – with Rees and Brown luxuriating in each other’s bodies while challenging the ways these bodies are valued and depicted in wider society – are charged and funny. There’s a crackling sense of danger to them, a willingness to probe into uncomfortable spaces. If the complications that flow from these scenes don’t quite cohere dramatically – a late introduction of an abuse scandal muddies the plot and distracts from the play’s key themes – they still throw up a lot of ethical questions around patient agency and medical ambition, about the role of big pharma in securing diagnostic outcomes and the axis of disability and money.
Director Hannah Fallowfield doesn’t always have a handle on the play’s lurching tonal register, even if she seems comfortable with Baldwin’s twisted sense of humour. The production often feels awkward and imprecise, and performances are uneven. As KT, the representation of corporate equivocation, Effie Nkrumah is terrific, brassy and sharp, with the slightest hint of wearied humanity underneath. But Sam’s newfound friend Evie (Ashley Apap) is too obviously a foil for the protagonist’s exuberance, and Apap doesn’t quite pull off the didactic advocacy speech late in the play.
The central couple navigate some very tricky material with goodwill and heart. Brown is far too young in the role – perhaps the image of a much older man opposite the young lover was too much of a transgression – but he manages to knit his character’s competing impulses into a cohesive whole. Rees, an actor who has a brachial plexus injury which stands in for Sam’s genetic disease, galvanises the play with a combination of charisma and imprudence; the two men careen through the play like a colourfully painted spinning top.
Baldwin has plenty to say with Telethon Kid: the bizarre practice of using sick, and often dying, children to encourage punters to part with their cash is only one of the real life perversions in Australia’s medical model he prosecutes here. Even the practice of naming diseases after the original physician rather than the original patient is put under the microscope. Doctors aren’t simple villains either; they’re depicted with a degree of humanity and compassion, for the ways in which they too are subjugated by the system.
Perhaps most potent of all is Baldwin’s investigation into the ways research funding of rare diseases aligns with and mirrors the culture of self promotion. The empowerment of social media, the sense of agency Sam gets from sexualising his disability, is frustrated at every turn by the medical and pharmaceutical industry, its tendency to infantilise and disempower. If this sometimes clumsy production fails to land every blow, it still manages to weigh into tough territory with the blackest humour as its chief weapon.
