Stephen B Calvert Clariosophic [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
What a story.
Athena Stevens, playwright and performer, was born with athetoid cerebral palsy.
And she is ballsy.
But in 2015 she suffered a devastating incident at the hands of British Airways, when the airline accepted her as a passenger on a plane that was too small for her motorised wheelchair, despite having been informed of the chair’s dimensions, causing Athena extreme humiliation and severe consequential harm. Worse yet, her wheelchair was destroyed in the incident.
This play, Scrounger, is a two-hander which makes light and dark in equal measure about this incident and its aftermath; a dramatised true story.
Here is a link to the Finborough resource on this play/production.
In type, it reminded me of Rohan Candappa’s candid piece about being made redundant unfairly by his company.
Athena Stevens starts the piece by “calling the audience out”, as she puts it in the playtext, reproaching us for our enlightened, left-leaningness.
It’s an interesting start.
Then she reproaches a “late-comer”, who the audience might be forgiven for taking at face value. Smug me, I realised this must be the other member of the cast, whereas Daisy, bless her, was taken in until the deceit was made obvious.
A rollercoaster piece ensues. The sense of injustice in the way that Athena was treated is palpable.
Yet, there is something about Athena’s immediate full-on social media and then media attack on BA which seemed, to me, counter productive.
I have only ever been driven to complain about relatively trivial or minor issues. I was reminded of my extensive correpsondence with Garuda Indonesia 25+ years ago:
My method in such circumstances, as indeed was Rohan’s in his rather Kafkaesque situation, is to threaten the faceless bureaucracy with public exposure of their jobsworthiness.
Athena Stevens, by contrast, went straight to the social media (and then the regular media), which I think was always likely to result in the unjust bureaucracy digging its heels in and taking its time over its responses.
Perhaps Athena’s is the modern way with social media and in any case I do sympathise with her very specific and difficult situation. But one part of her story, which adds to the darkness of it, is the way this matter caused a breakdown in her relationship with her boyfriend. She wanted to seek legal advice as well, whereas he wanted her to stick solely with the media campaign; he felt that going to the law was (I paraphrase) “too aggressive”.
My view, for what it is worth, is that a media camapaign is at least as aggressive, if not more so, than asserting formally that the other party has been negligent.
But as a piece of drama, the story unfolds wonderfully well, with some clever devices of deisgn and trickery along the way. Athena Stevens is a very good writer and she wrote this story with great gusto.
There are some great lines in the play. After her humiliation at Heathrow, BA Uber Athena (Scrounger) home.
I wanted the ride home to be quiet, but the driver turns on LBC.
There is no level of hell, which cannot sink further…with the addition of an LBC broadcast.
Athena Stevens’s performance is also something to behold, as indeed is the performance of Leigh Quinn, who played a plethora of other parts with great energy and skill.
Janie and I thought this a superb piece and a great start to our 2020 theatre-going. It’s been well received and quite widely reviewed. So you don’t need to take our words for it – click here for the reviews and stuff.