Glass Child | The Farm

Glass Child is a brilliant, visceral, finely strung play, with that most rare of qualities, true emotional connection. The phrase ‘glass child’ is a term used to describe the experience of the siblings of children with greater needs. That is, that sometimes those kids are ‘looked through’ because the needs of one child, for whatever reason, draw the attention of the family unit. This show turns that phrase on its head and shows a deeply personal story of love and affection, in a world where difference draws cruelty both pointed and casual. In this case, the sibling is not being looked through, rather, she is doing the looking, and also the telling.

This image + cover image: Kate Holmes

Kayah, a young man with Down Syndrome and his sister Maitreyah, take to the stage and share elements of their life story using dance, theatre, prose and poetry.

This is hands down the best piece of storytelling I’ve seen this year. This is a genuine challenge to any other productions to top it for sheer vibrating power. From the first scene, where Maitreyah’s voice cracks just ever so slightly, I know I am witness to something extraordinary. What follows is a whirlwind of emotions, for each of them, and most definitely for me.

Kayah is a sassy larrikan with a massive passion for life, for dance, for embracing the now. His hysterical entrance was the perfect antidote to the incoming danger in his sister’s eyes. His flipping off dance is a glorious fuck you to the world, to the doubters, to the naysayers, to the cruel asshats who don’t know how to dig deep and find some human decency.

Image: Lowana Davies

Maitreyah is a true force of nature with her no-holds-barred degustation of snippets of family life, and the injustice she witnesses against her older brother as she grows old enough to understand that in the wider world, difference is not only noticed, but taunted and goaded. She starts at about 75% tightly-self-contained fever pitch and only goes higher from there, moving between backing her brother up, carefully reinterpreting his cheeky chatter, using dance to demonstrate her own tangle of emotions, and finally, together at the very end, a wild and climatic pas de deux.

The Farm have a reputation for creating evocative pieces of theatre that dig into stories not often shared on stage, and for that they can be congratulated. This is a fine example of that. It’s the kind of theatre that changes you as a person, no matter who you are, whether you see yourself reflected as protagonist, parent, sibling, ally… or antagonist.  It’s the kind of life-affirming storytelling than people with disabilities need to see, because they never get to see these stories truly represented on stage. And they should, and we should, because this puts the endless grey iterations of the usual chaff on stages to shame. Finally, a story worth telling. I feel invigorated.

Image: Kate Holmes

Like all my favourite works, it hovers in that liminal place between deeply personal and universal, and that’s where the magic lies. For me, the best theatre works like the space between two mirrors, reflecting the personal and universal back on itself in an endless vortex. This is the kind of theatre that makes you pull out the slate and take a true accounting of self. This is not my story but it sure made me think about my part in this story. This show is deeply personal. And it is impossible to watch something personal without feeling your own heart beat. We are a species that loves to paint pictures with movement and words, and we can’t help but recognise these storylines of love, anger, injustice, redemption.

Between the two of them we get to witness the brutality of bullying, the deep joy of unconditional love, the slow and endless purgatory of a world filled with injustice, the frenzy of release when you burn it all down. And lest you think this is about one sibling ‘saving’ another, let me tell you, it is far from that, in fact, they hold each other up.

We are treated to a remarkable poem in Kayah’s own voice, that summons demons and gods, that’s mythological in its beauty. There was a heart-in-my-mouth dance along a strip of bright green plastic turf, lit perfectly by one overbright spotlight that cast a shadow that grew up higher than Kayah, like a beast on his back, an other-worldly shadow self. Truly, I was reminded of the seminal scene in Bryony Kimming’s I’m a Phoenix Bitch where she climbed out of the cave of madness and into the light.  And what it had in common was that which cannot be faked, cannot be acted, cannot be fashioned with any kind of pretence. We were privileged to witness some kind of true emancipation.  

Very satisfying, very exciting. This is the real shit. There were some rough edges that mattered not at all. Truly I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time to come.

Image: Lowana Davies