“When the shit hits the fan, they blame the mum.” I will never forget these words. These are Dr Sara Ryan’s, an academic with extensive expertise in disability studies and autism. Her impassioned message is at the heart of Stephen Unwin’s play, Laughing Boy.
Ryan’s autistic son, Connor Sparrowhawk, known affectionately by his family as Laughing Boy, was an eighteen year old boy with a learning disability and epilepsy. On July 4th, 2013, Connor was found drowned in the bath at a specialist Short Term Assessment and Treatment unit, part of the National Health Service, in Oxford.
The circumstances of Connor’s death were covered up,, and attributed to “natural causes”. When Ryan questioned this, she became subject to a protracted and cruel witch-hunt. Ryan had blogged about Connor’s admission, which came about after a sudden change in his demeanour, and she continued to write after his death. Her words were weaponised and used against her during Connor’s Inquest. In 2018, five long years after Connor’s death, after an extensive campaign by his family, the NHS Trust with oversight of the Assessment and Treatment Unit faced a criminal prosecution and plead guilty to causing the deaths of Connor and another patient.
Award winning playwright and theatre director, Stephen Unwin, who happens also to be the father of a son with learning disabilities, and a campaigner for the rights of learning-disabled people, dramatised Ryan’s memoir, Justice for Laughing Boy. Operatic in scope, the shocking story of Connor’s preventable death and the cover-up that followed, is presented through the eyes of Connor’s loving, lively family. This profoundly sad story is narrated starkly, yet with acerbic wit, in a high-energy performance which proceeds at pace, with no interval. Without props or changes of costume, this makes for a sparse stage, with the action unfolding against large-scale cinematic projections of text exchanges, and excerpts from clinical notes.
There is a single door at the back of the stage. Unwin’s play opens with a grim foreshadowing of what will take place on the other side of that door – Connor’s mother will be asked to consent to the withdrawal of life support and to the harvesting of his heart valves, whichwill occur immediately afterwards.
The urgent, activist energy that begins in this deathbed scene, carries the audience through the play. Thus Unwin dramatises the page-turning urgency of Ryan’s memoir, which is a damning critique of systemic and individual medical failure. The short, dramatic monologues by actors playing members of Connor’s family give the play an elegiac quality and call to mind the legal testimony that was necessary before the truth finally emerged. Ryan’s numerous dialogues with the ghost of Connor, who asks repetitive questions, including “Am I dead now, Mum?”, invokes many impossible possibilities. Although Ryan’s articulate pain and injustice fills the theatre, Connor’s death is centre stage. His mother speaks, but the audience are compelled to witness her son’s life, his passion for buses and the enormous joy that he brought his family. Connor remains on stage, almost until the end of the play, when he goes through that door. The audience knows what will follow, yet his death feels shocking and is unbearably painful to witness.
The Jermyn Street Theatre is an unusually intimate space. Although it is in central London, the audience are as close to one another, and to the actors, as if in a small village hall. I had the privilege of attending a relaxed performance, which meant that the house lights were up, and audience members could see each other’s responses to the challenging scenes unfolding so close to us. My fellow audience members and I exchanged devastated glances when we watched Connor’s brother, Tom, who at thirteen was deemed too young to visit Connor on the Assessment and Treatment Unit, sat in a fast-food restaurant, waiting. The nursing staff had forgotten to bring Connor out to meet him. Tom never saw his brother again.
Because the house lights were up, I noticed fellow members of the audience were also jolted from their seats by the violent juxtapositions, most notably, Ryan on the bus, texting about Connor’s upcoming school prom. Meanwhile, on the Assessment and Treatment Unit, Connor has drowned in the bath. Ryan takes a call, and the faux-jolly reassurance provided by the doctor caused many members of the audience to writhe in our seats in pain. This was, rightly, an emotionally demanding play to watch. Even when witnessing happy family scenes, the audience would look at the door at the back of the stage and be reminded that Connor would die. When Ryan spoke directly to the audience, her face wet with tears, the audience wept with her.
It was profoundly uncomfortable to witness the demonisation of Ryan. Unwin shows us how Ryan’s blog was scrutinised within hours of Connor’s death, and subsequently how her words, written in raw grief, were weaponised by the legal teams acting for the NHS Trust. For example, in the courtroom scene, the barrister acting for the clinic quotes directly from the clinical notes in which healthcare staff document that Ryan kept a blog about her son’s care. In the blog, after Connor’s death, Ryan’s nickname for the Southern Health Board, became “Sloven Health” and these words are quoted back at her in court. In his introduction, Unwin writes, “Connor Sparrowhawk wasn’t the first young person to die in an institution supposedly set up to help, and tragically won’t be the last.” I am compelled to agree. Connor is not an isolated case. Too many young people have died in institutions that purport to care for them.
Many of those young people would still be with us, if only healthcare staff listened to, and respected, the expertise-by-experience of their mothers. Throughout the play, healthcare staff diminish Ryan’s expertise, from the paediatrician who persists in addressing her as “Mum”, to the staff on the unit where Connor died, who “noted and dismissed” Ryan’s concerns, ignored Ryan’s reports about his epileptic seizures and minimised her professional and personal expertise.
Ryan’s activism and relentless quest for justice calls to mind the incredible work done by other bereaved mothers, including the journalist, Merope Mills, whose thirteen- year-old daughter, Martha, died of sepsis after the family’s calls for a second option were dismissed by doctors. Mills campaigned for the establishment of Martha’s Rule, which now allows patients and families to seek an urgent review if the condition of a loved one is deteriorating, and they feel that their concerns are not listened to. I thought too of Paula McGowan, whose autistic son Oliver McGowan died aged 18, after being administered anti-psychotic medication, despite her telling staff that he reacted badly to it. The antipsychotics caused brain swelling and ultimately provoked Oliver’s death. His mother campaigned to set up compulsory autism training for all NHS staff, in an attempt to prevent future fatal reactions to antipsychotic drugs.
On my way home from Jermyn Street Theatre, I stopped at St James’ Church, Piccadilly. In the church, I lit a candle in front of Connor’s memorial quilt, which is displayed there during this run of Laughing Boy. The quilt, an awe-inspiring piece of needlework, was made from hundreds of contributions by children and adults from around the world, in an act of support for Connor’s family, during their quest for justice and truth. The contributions were stitched together by four women: Janis Firminger, Janet Read, Margaret Taylor and Jean Draper. I left St James’s thinking of how often mothers are left to stitch fragments back together. Quilting, campaigning and memorialisation are often women’s work. The last quilt I saw in St James’ was the AIDS memorial quilt, a wall of tributes to the premature deaths of predominantly young men who were often deeply stigmatised.
The words on the back of a postcard of the Connor’s quilt invited me to: “Tell someone about Connor. Think about him when you see a bus!” So, on my way to the underground station, I bought an enamel pin of a red London bus. Connor’s bus. It reminds me of the bus that Sara Ryan took into work in Oxford on July 4th, 2013. I think of Ryan texting her friend about Connor’s upcoming prom. I think of the violent collision of Ryan’s professional and personal lives. I think of the call telling Ryan that her son was in the John Radcliffe Hospital after being found unconscious in the bath. The enamel bus reminds me that after Connor died in the institution that was meant to be looking after him, his mother was blamed for not telling them clearly enough about his epilepsy. The bus reminds me of the lies and witch-hunt that followed. Above all, Connor’s bus reminds me that in her grief, Sara Ryan did what too many mothers still have to do: fight and labour for the dignity of her child, even in death.
Laughing Boy is at Jermyn Street Theatre, London from 25th April to 31st May, 2024
