Jenny Sealey has been the artistic director of the Graeae Theatre Company since 1997 and pioneer of theatrical practice regarding inclusion, and been involved in many landmark productions, including the Paralympic opening ceremony in 2012. She is currently taking her one woman show, ‘Self Raising’, on the road.

Interview by Tom Jamison

What can we expect from ‘Self-Raising’?
Well, it’s autobiographical. It’s a tale of my family. But actually, as I tell the story, you can see people go: ‘Oh yeah, I get it; that’s happened to me’. So, there’s something weirdly familiar about it. It’s basically, family secrets and a little bit about me growing up as a Deaf person. 

Why take it into the public arena? 
Well, I wasn’t going to do this. I was going to adapt a book called ‘Flour Babies’ by Anne Fine. I was part of a group of artists called The Incubator Group, which was set up to allow artists just to spend some time developing ideas and thoughts. I was developing Flour Babies, when over dinner one night, we were all just telling stories about families and I told a story about my family and one of them said to me, ‘Jenny, are you going to be in your show?’ 

Now that I’m doing it, I love doing it.

Some of the material is pretty painful though, isn’t it?
It is emotional to do. But I feel very privileged to be allowed to do this.

The more I talk about growing up Deaf, the more I grieve all the conversations I’ve missed out on. I sort of feel pissed off. My education was shambolic. 

Had I had access to the Deaf community, had I had access to sign language… But back then, and still now, everyone was hell bent on Deaf people being as ‘hearing’ as possible. So, I was as hearing as possible. They called me ‘hard of hearing’ and when I was little, I thought that meant I wasn’t trying hard enough. So, I felt it was my fault. 

Even now, I will be with a group of hearing people with a smattering of signing, I’m a super lipreader but I miss endless conversations, although I’m so used to it now, I’m such a superlative liar. There are only so many times you can say pardon in any conversation; you get bored of saying it. 

How have you coped professionally, with that?
Professionally, I get Access to Work, which means I have a pool of interpreters. I very rarely go to a meeting around anything to do with theatre or business meetings without interpreters because it’s paramount that I get every word. 

How do you look back on 25 years with Graeae? What do you think it’s achieved in that time?
The company’s huge now, it was weeny when I took over and we’ve been through some really bumpy rides, including programming mistakes and casting mistakes. It’s been messy, but also totally and utterly glorious. To be one of the first companies to really explore creative captioning, to explore embedding audio descriptions into the heart of a narrative and, before my time, Ewan Marshall, my predecessor, started doing bilingual work so everything was signed with the interpreter in the mix. I carried on doing that, partly because I’m Deaf and I want to be able to access my own work. So, we’ve had a most glorious theatrical time exploring how everything to do with access is practical and it’s functional, but God, it’s artistic. 

With so many projects under your belt, what do you regard as the highlights and major milestones?Setting up the first actor training course, called The Missing Piece, was a massive highlight because we’ve set so many actors on their way, and now they’re out there strutting their stuff with Graeae, with other disabled led companies and the mainstream; so training has been huge for us. 

All the plays that I’ve done have challenged me, have been thought provoking and have moved the company’s thinking on. When I started Graeae, I had to go and knock on people’s doors and beg co-producers, then one said, ‘Jen, do you want to co-produce with us?’ That’s when I knew the tables had turned. 

Doing ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’ with Theatre Royal Stratford East, we discussed doing something around Ian Dury with our patron and they said, yeah, this should be a musical and they let me have artistic control. Doing Reasons, being in and around all of that phenomenal Ian Dury music, the building was alive. So, Reasons to be Cheerful was mega, as was doing our first two operas, ‘The Paradis Files’ and ‘This is Not For You’, which was about what happened to veterans when they came back after the First World War. Our building where we are, our headquarters, is a massive milestone. Now we have our own lovely space with rehearsal space and offices. And it’s beautiful, it’s theatrical, it’s not medical at all. And I suppose doing the London 2012 Paralympic opening ceremony, I think that has to go down as a bit of a milestone.

With the Paralympic opening ceremony in mind, how did you start in telling the story of the contribution made by British disabled people?
We knew we wanted Stephen Hawking. We wanted to Spasticus Autisticus from Ian Dury, and we sort of found our way to knowing that we wanted the statue of Alison Lapper. So, we knew that it was going to be big, and it was going to be political.

It was amazing. We had to deliver our narrative to government before they went off on their holidays. We had five weeks to come up with something. Boris (Johnson) said, ‘Oh, this is quite clever’. Jeremy Hunt said: ‘Spasticus Autisticus is not a very joyful song’. I went ‘Oh, it is, it’s very joyful, it’s our anthem!’ And then they sort of forgot about us, because they were so focused on trying to get Danny Boyle’s production off the ground.

The Arts Council gave us the biggest training course ever, for 44 Deaf, disabled and visually impaired people, some of whom were veterans, and we put them through the most rigorous circus training. That was phenomenal.

And then the same was true also of the volunteers. When we told them the story that this is all pushing toward absolute democracy and equality; they liked it and wanted to be part of it. It was beyond stressful. It was also beyond joyful. 

It also seems that you cunningly ‘abused’ the opportunity to do anything you wanted. Has that informed your work since?
After 2012, while everyone was euphoric, the Government took away the Independent Living Fund, they put a cap on Access to Work and there were a lot of cuts, so suddenly our bubble burst. Thinking disability’s finally sexy, we are the moment, that was stripped away from us. So our focus had to be about how to campaign, how do we support the artists that have been abandoned? Everything was just a mess.

I lost all my confidence. All I wanted to do was be in a classroom with five-year-olds. Because five-year-olds ground you like nobody else. So, I did some work in schools. I just started to build myself back. 

So, I suppose some of the work that we did afterwards like, ‘This Is Not For You’ was massively political. I’m not a scared to put the political agenda on the table. 

Going back to Self-Raising, do you need to confess that you’re the kind of director who really is the classic frustrated performer?
I started out as an actor. So, I’ve come full circle. I haven’t really done any acting for 31 years, so it was a bit of a baptism of fire. I forgot what the nerves are like!

Tour dates:
6 – 17 February Soho Theatre, London
20 – 21 February Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough
22 – 23 February, Liverpool Everyman
29 February – 1 March, Derby Theatre
4 – 5 March Live Theatre, Newcastle
7 – 9 March Mercury Theatre, Colchester
12 – 13 March Warwick Arts Centre
14 March, Nottingham Playhouse
19 – 20 March Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol
22 – 23 March, Leeds Playhouse

To purchase tickets, follow the links via: graeae.org/event/self-raising/