The government is struggling to address the crisis in social care. Charities and volunteers can help, but we must not be the only answer
Tackling loneliness. Of course, every single one of us has experienced loneliness. But do we really understand what it means to feel like a true outcast of society, because of disability we, or a loved one, suffers? That is something our actors our starting to explore as they get to grips with the characters of Bri and Sheila, and learn what it means to be parents of a severely disabled child. In our play ‘A Day in the Death of Joe Egg’, which we are performing at Norwich’s The Garage Theatre in May, family and friends offer help, but their clumsy and misplaced offers of assistance do nothing to ease the social exclusion that Bri and Sheila feel.
‘Joe Egg’ was written in 1967. Surely things have changed - people have more understanding; there is less loneliness now. Is this the case? The plethora of news articles like the one above force us to come to the opposite conclusion - government cuts to public services are cutting people off from one another more than ever. As, in rehearsals, Bri and Sheila reach for each other in sudden recognition of the fact that having another human being to hold shines light in the darkest places, let us embrace the fact that we all have a duty to mitigate loneliness we see in others. As Sheila says of her disabled daughter Joe, “She’s only one kind of cripple.” Although expressing herself in what seems to us now the ‘non-PC’ language of the 60s, Sheila has hit upon a truth - broken hearts are as paralysing as broken bodies. Let’s not allow crippling loneliness be the heavy inheritance we leave our children.