Intro
Welcome to the Disability and... podcast bringing together thoughtful discussion and debate. This month, writer, dramaturg and director, Kate Lovell chats with artistic director of Zoo Co theatre, Flo O’Mahony, about Perfect Show for Rachel, which is currently on tour. This show contains strong language.
Kate Lovell
Hello and welcome to the Disability and... podcast. My name is Kate Lovell, and I am delighted to be joined by Flo O’Mahony, who is artistic director of Zoo Co, and she's here with us today to talk all things. Perfect show for Rachel, hi, Flo.
Flo O’Mahony
Yes, Hello, Kate. How are you doing?
Kate Lovell
I'm well. How are you?
Flo O’Mahony
I'm good. Thank you. I'm really excited to chat to you today.
Kate Lovell
So Perfect Show for Rachel. Our listeners may be a cult fan who's seen it five times, or they may not have heard of it. So, could you give us a brief overview of what Perfect Show for Rachel is?
Flo O’Mahony
Yes, I can do my best. So Perfect Show for Rachel is a show that I've made with my sister Rachel. So, although I’m the Artistic Director of Zoo Co really for the for the purposes of this conversation, I'm just Rachel's sister. Rachel is learning disabled. She lives in a care home, and she's always been really excited by theatre. She's the reason that we started touring all of our performances as relaxed as standard, because she doesn't give a shit about the uptight rules of being in a British theatre audience anyway, so if she came, it would be relaxed, because she wouldn't be following those rules anyway. And we found that when Rachel came and when we said, oh, this is relaxed performance, the work got obviously more inclusive, and that's great, but for our artistic selves, it also became more crackly and alive and electric. And we've kind of been chasing that feeling, that sense that we are humans talking to humans in a room on stage for the whole time. So about 10 years ago, I had a thought about what it might be like to make a show that was something to do with Rachel. Now my caveat is there are quite a lot of siblings of learning disabled people who work in the arts, you can make of that what you will. I imagine we all need a little bit of the love and attention, but I was pretty sure that other artists had already articulated the experience of being someone's sibling and my disability politic and my artistic curiosity was more interested in what it might be like to make art that Rachel would be part of or respond to, or something like that. I didn't know what the show would become. So, it was really just that question of, what if Rachel was in the room? Anyway, we got her into the New Diorama. Years ago, we did our first three days of R and D, and it was so clear that she was going to steal my job as a director. And the second that happened, it was like, oh, whoa. You know, I wish I'd thought of that, you know, before I'd got her in a room, but I had to wait to see that she wanted to be in charge. And that kind of changed everything I thought I might be making a one woman show, sort of for and with Rachel, and with Rachel as the director. Suddenly, of course, the pyramid of how you make theatre just crumbled. So, if you put Rachel at the helm of something, things like, should we make this play? Is it ethical to make this play? Can we make a play? How might we do that? What tech does Rachel need to make decisions and lead? And Rachel's inherent way of being was one that was not going to stay on script. And so putting a script there would have been counter to her being in charge. So now the show is, can we step into Rachel's world for 75 minutes and be led by her live on stage every night? So, she sits at the side of the stage, facing the actors and the audience. Half the time, actually, she's very interested by them. At this gigantic tech desk with like 50 different massive buttons, she looks like she's going to launch a rocket into space, and each one triggers something different that Rachel wants us to show you. So, it might be like a video or a song or a dance or a game or a chat. And she also is mic’d, so she can verbally direct us if she wants to. That's not always accessible for her, but she can. Her voice is scribed as if it's kind of poetry in the Bible. So, she talks all the way through the show. So, we have these scribe screens, so you know what she's saying. And the whole performance is like poppy, colourful, campy, fun, slapstick, violent, grimy, these buttons the way that they kind of pop up, and then in between those buttons, sometimes Rachel doesn't press a button for five or 10 minutes or longer, and there might be audience interaction or a conversation, and it's grown and grown. So when we first previewed the show, I think there was like about 20 buttons on the desk, and now I think we're touring with about 40 plus some kind of rogue easter egg things that aren't on the desk, but Rachel might just trigger verbally. So, it's got Kylie Minogue drag acts. It's got fart jokes, which I hate, but it's not my show, so we have to do them. It's got fight scenes that my mum, who's on stage as Rachel's carer, gets involved in. She finishes off a big pub brawl. It's amazing. We've got dirty dancing, we've got the streets singing, who's got the bag? So like, it's not just maybe the assumptions you might make about what a learning disabled adult might like, which is often, people often project an idea around taste making from learning disabled makers that Rachel sometimes absolutely falls into. Like she loves Disney and colour and campy pop panto land, but she also really likes us all telling each other to shut up, to Stormzy Shut up. And she really likes who's got the bag, and there's a button where it just says, Why don't you get a job? and we sing The Offsprings, Why don't you get a job? to the musical director who's playing the song, and suddenly he realizes he's in the firing line. So it's like, it's a show that makes me have to really think about my family, and I think it's a bit like that with audiences as well. There's real sisters on stage. I've got my work sister Fleur, who's one of my best mates, and co-founders of Zoo Co in the show. Lee's in the show. My mum's on stage. My boyfriend is currently touring with us, sometimes supporting us, and a kind of care level for Rachel, but he ends up getting roped in because she quite likes him. And then there's this incredible cast of people, and they're like really established performers, actually a local to you in Hornchurch is Stephen Collins in rehearsals. We always call him Stephen Collin's from Dune because he was in the Dune movies. The musical director is one of the co-founders of Showstopper. So I kind of think when I describe the show, I want to talk about its heartbeat, but also want to talk about its quality and this kind of amazing crew of people who've done like West End musicals and performed in Showstopper, and they're still willing to come and kind of get the artistic shit beaten out of them by my big sister myself heavily included in that I'm often the butt of every joke, but yeah, so that's my rundown of the show today, really.
Kate Lovell
Thank you, absolutely. And I'm fortunate enough to have seen the show when it was at the Pit in the Barbican, but a number of years ago, so I was really excited when you said there's twice as many buttons. Thinking when I next see it, it will be very different,
Flo O’Mahony
And Rachel's really different. I mean, when you would have seen it, would have been when we were there with the Oxford Samuel Beckett theatre trust award, and we just did eight shows, and we didn't even know if when the audience walked in, Rachel might walk out, like we really didn't know how it was going to go, and she was very much reliant on the desk as her main mode of communication so she could trigger something and then her words might be something like, this is for Rachel, I like it, or what are you doing, Flo? But now, cut to three years later, she has come back into the show with a vengeance, so she's like extremely verbally communicative in the show, to the point where we realized that the desk wasn't giving her enough directorial input. So we now have a mechanism where she can say cut at any time, and then I pull out a director's menu, and if she wants it, I whisper to her, Do you want them to be loud or quiet, or big or small or angry or fall over or kill someone or hit someone, and so she can really pick the nuance and details of each button now, whereas before, she was kind of just really excited to hit the buttons, now she hits the buttons and she wants to control them. And most recently, that led to her also directing her audience, which was amazing. She's growing into her directorial persona and learning what she can assert control over, which is everything really.
Kate Lovell
And when you're talking just then, it struck me how the show is obviously political, inherently because of putting a learning disabled person at the absolute centre and as director, but it's also really blowing apart the walls on what can be enigmatic world of theatre, especially director as a role. Which, I think, yes, people don't necessarily know what a director does, but when you said about that menu, you know.
Flo O’Mahony
Especially in artistic spaces that are focused on access and inclusion, you'll know this because you also are in this, you're a director of accessible theatre. We want to be kind in our practice. We don't want to uphold the traditional stereotypes of what directing can be. And then Rachel comes in. She's like a generous dictator. I don't even know if she's generous. She wants what she wants, and she's clear about it, and she's given me this without ever poking fun or excluding someone intentionally or whatever. She doesn't uphold any of the ickiness of being that. But she is so meticulous about what she wants, and she'll tell you, and she tells you clearly. And I think there's something I've learned. About how to hold an accessible practice, which is, it does not have to be at the softening of your artistic edge. Of course, your politic has to be super strong. But I think I've spent sometimes thinking, oh, maybe the art can compromise, because I don't want to be unkind, whereas actually Rachel is kind of kind in her clarity. It's the only show I've ever worked on where because our director is super clear and understanding Rachel is a whole skill that the whole company has had to learn how to listen and how to understand her on a very deep level, not just a linguistic one, which isn't always where her plane of communication is, but actually, if we tune into her, she's super clear and she's black and white about what she wants. And if we're just listening enough, then that's crispy, clean. And it's so relieving to work on a show with such an inherently clear audience, one person, just Rachel. We tell the audience, it's a bonus if you happen to enjoy it, but it's really just for Rachel, and as an artist, that's been incredibly relieving, because I've spent a lot of years. I'm sure every director can relate to this going, what will people think? How can I make sure everything's okay for everyone? And Rachel doesn't worry herself with that, partly because she can't, but partly because she doesn't want to. And that clarity is something that I've actually brought, you know, trying to bring into my own practice. How can I be super clear about what I want? I'm really in touch with my gut, not just my sort of I don't have got this sort of persona of becoming like the village MP where I just want everything to be okay in the rehearsal room. And actually, Rachel's meticulousness has taught me a lot about how relieving that can be for a group of artists to go it's really clear what you want, and you're telling me, and it's hard, yes, I've got to do the Dirty Dancing lift nine times today. I've got to run a fight scene where I fall over 15 times because you've told me to. But at the end of the day, I know I've done my job. And that's like beautiful clarity, I think, especially in a very Neurodivergent room, that clarity is so welcome.
Kate Lovell
Yes, oh, absolutely. I really relate to a lot of what you were talking about, about directing and on this show, obviously, you're, you're, you're not directing, but you are facilitating, along with other artists, and your show is out on tour, and you're you've partnered with Improbable for this phase of work. I wondered how that collaboration came about.
Flo O’Mahony
Oh yeah, I get a bit soppy whenever I talk about working with Lee, and he's not here, so he can't cringe at me and tell me that it's too much. But Lee Simpson co AD of improbable came into my life actually really weird back story, and it's totally a nepotism story, but I do think that people can meet Lee out in the wild, so don't feel too guilty about it, but my best mate, when I was five, moved to the house next door to Lee and Janita. Over the years, my mum got to know Janita, and therefore I got to know Lee a little bit. And when I was about 19, I got to shadow one of his processes with Angela Clerkin on The Bear. And I was not ready for it. I wasn't ready for the way that his practice would slowly over the next decade, infiltrate my life. But they were working in open space. They were working with improvisation and devising on a really like, grown up show. These were really grown up, established artists. And they kept saying things like, well, I don't know. Or, well, I feel like doing this now, or, oh, I've got to take a rest now. And I was like, What the hell is this? I'm a real control freak. You can tell that the whole way through the show, there's no there's no secret in the fact that I find it really hard to give away control, but I watched this kind of non-hierarchical, deeply alive practice kind of unfold, and I was totally not ready. I went, Yeah, yeah, that's great. But at drama school, I learned how to do all these other things, so it took me a long time to kind of come round to that way of being, and really what Lee being my mentor felt like, and it was sort of a tacit agreement between us was he would take me for a really sad lunch at the Edinburgh Fringe, normally three weeks in, and asked me how I was doing. And, of course, I was always like, chronically depressed and ill in ill health, because it was the fringe. And occasionally I'd call him for some advice on how to be kind, whilst you tell someone they're not going to get a part or, you know, whatever, just like whatever big problem was in me, I would sometimes call him and ask. He'd always say he didn't know, and then he'd say something so wise about his own experience of that thing that I would kind of come away a bit better at dealing with those things, which I'm so grateful for. And I kind of credit him with the reason that I have become like 50% less of an arsehole in my life. I'm sure there's still lots of arseholery to kind of go but the thing about him is that he really trusts in the instinct and self-realisation of the artists he works with. So, when I started talking to him about Perfect Show, it took me a couple of years of these Edinburgh lunches to say, could you help me with this? Because I realised Rachel wasn't going to work to a script. And he said, Actually, yeah, I think this is the first show that I could really be useful to you on. When we first brought people together to make this show, I thought we might get cancelled. I might harm my sister. I've really checked all these things. I've really worked hard to topple all the potential problems that could come up. We had that show that got known as puppetgate at the Southwark Playhouse, who really harmed autistic audiences in, I think, where they felt like they were doing their best to tell a story that they told harmfully. We had a session on the wall in early R and D. How are we making sure Rachel isn't a puppet? And really, Lee's practice underpins the entire thing, I think, at every moment where I got scared as an artist and thought, well, we'll have to organize how the show's going to end. We'll have to give her a finale button. He would say, I think we should let Rachel improvise her ending. Oh, yeah, you're right. Oh, I have to write a 10-page essay that I read to the audience at the beginning, so they know all of the things we've thought about. And we, you know, they can't think there's no stone left unturned. It was like, kind of like an insurance monologue at the beginning of the show. How can I make sure everyone knows that we have thought about it? And he went, I don't think you need to tell them that. I think the show, you know, and he was always this, this person underpinning that. And what's more, when I say improvisation, I really only know it through the Improbable lens. And I've learned lots from Phelim and from Matilda, the other two co ADs as well, but they mean it in this slow, electric, alive way. How can we use improvisation? And someone said this to me at Improbable, they said, oh, we think improv can change the world. And I went, you old hippie. And now I've seen how if I improvise with Rachel, I stopped scripting how I want her to be. I stopped writing how a joke should end, or how I think what I think success looks like in an artistic or social lens. And I start taking what she offers me, and I actually say yes, and I actually build on that. And if I can do that, then actually the world does change a bit for Rachel, at least, and then the people around her, and then the community around that family, and then her care home. And really, he'd done all this work. He'd done a really deep version of therapy with some friends autistic daughter. She's non-verbal. This is back in the 90s, so really different language around those things, but it was intense interaction that was entirely about working on yourself, not on the person, so not hoping that that person would change, noticing how you were and spending hours kind of addressing the ableism we all have in us about how disabled people should be and how we really want someone to talk to us. We really want eye contact. We really want you know, we have this almost urgency around Can you be a bit less disabled around people who we perceive as being profoundly disabled in some way? And he'd also made a show called Coma, where they explored, is it possible to improvise with somebody who was in a coma or dream, like the state and that kind of blew out of the water. Any ideas I had about Rachel not being collaborative enough, like if you can improvise with somebody who's in a coma, if you can kind of use what they use is Arnie Mindell's world work process to apply it in a performative performance kind of setting. He's this kind of psychiatrist practitioner, so not a theatre maker. But if you can apply that to someone in a coma, who I have made lots of assumptions about in my life, and maybe anyone listening might make the same be really tricky to improvise with someone in a coma. How on earth would I go about that, if I can work on this micro level with someone in a coma, if Lee and Phelim have explored that and shared bits of that in our process. Then working with Rachel is a walk in the park, she gives so much. She's so generous. This improvisational practice isn't just us playing silly games on stage, which we also do, and Rachel loves it's not just that kind of sport, sporty version of improv. Underneath it is, can I be okay not knowing what's going to happen in the next second or minute or hour? And Lee has really done all that. But it was so funny. I was saying, like, I got scared a lot in the rehearsal process. Like one day Rachel came in, she was unwell and she had the wrong carer next to her, and the tech wasn't working and her video wasn't on, and she's kind of pissed off with us. It was just before we went to the Barbican for the first time. Oh, and the Barbican was so fretting about getting cancelled that they asked us to think about a mechanism for how if someone thought that we'd been exploiting Rachel in the rehearsal room, how they could know that we hadn't because they wanted to be able to interview Rachel. And we were like, that's not going to work for Rachel. She's not a question-and-answer girly. So instead, we decided to pay disabled peer reviewers to come in and witness the process, so this day they're all in and. My pressure is, you know, I want to impress the disabled artists we're paying to come in and respond creatively. And the whole point is, they respond to what they really see, not what we hope they see or whatever. Anyway, Rachel comes in, and she directs, like a 15-minute version of the show. And then she goes, and it's really flat, no songs, no games, just like a couple of buttons. And she goes, it is finished, and I go, do you want a song? Do you want to dance like? I've kind of prepared for Rachel not coming on stage. There's a version of the show that can happen if she ever chose not to which she never has. And I've prepared for Rachel loving the show and us having to tell her it's finished, but hadn't prepared for her having, like, a grumpy show, because anyone can, and there were all of these reasons that she was grumpy and I freaked out. I just went, No, no, no, no, no. We're going to get people asking for refunds. It's going to be awful. They're going to think that Rachel's unhappy, you know, it's going to basically, a complete ego meltdown of everyone's going to blame me. And Lee sort of looked at me and went, this is really hard, but Rachel's reminding us that she's in charge and that she might say no if we get it wrong, and the techs not working, and she's got the wrong carer, and she's feeling poorly and her TV's not on, and she's reminding us she doesn't just accept anything that comes. She's not willing to take our shit version of the show. She wants the full thing, and if she doesn't get it, she's a meticulous director who's going to say no. And those kind of moments Lee has really rescued me into; how do I fold this possibility into how do I bring this about in the show? How do we accept what's really happening in Rachel and work with that? And yeah, maybe the audience could have seen that show, and it would have been uncomfortable, but they would have still been seeing us respond to Rachel, rather than me at the end, going, are you sure it's done? Do you want to dance? You know, and so it's sort of guidance how to live your life. And I would prescribe time in a workshop with Lee to pretty much anyone for like a world that's more attuned to what's really happening, able to be responsive and also just softer and kinder and gentler than most of the ways we treat ourselves in the arts. And I do think that that's the Zoo Co Improbable merge. So Improbable practice underpins all of this liveness in the show. And we have made a lot more accessible theatre on purpose, and Improbable have done amazing stuff with lots of disabled artists, but our work really had that kind of we knew how to make a deaf and hearing piece. The piece is bilingual. We knew about captioning. We knew about how to support Rachel, and the people supporting Rachel and the space is full of, unsurprisingly, in a show where you just have to be okay being in the shit every night, the show is full of people with different access needs who think differently. So, there's a lot of Neurodivergent folks in our company. And I think people often look at the show and go, there's Rachel and there's the Deaf performer, but actually there's a whole myriad of different access needs. And you know, Zoo Co knew how to make that work for those artists. I hope, of course, we still get it wrong sometimes.
Kate Lovell
It sounds to me like it was really important to have you know, this is your sister. You mentioned that your mum is involved in the show. It's so deeply personal that having an artist alongside you who has a little bit one step removed.
Flo O’Mahony
Absolutely we get a great wellbeing offer on this tour, and I've taken it up. I'm doing six sessions. So, I was telling the woman about my job on the show, and she said, I've just counted. And I think you have 13 different hats on, and it's true, I have artistic director, I have, like, a safety thing around being a CEO. I'm a performer. I have to sing, which is like a whole different hat for me, because I can't I need to think about the BSL, and I'm constantly looking at the deaf access. I need to be Rachel's sister. I need to be my mom's daughter. I need to be, sometimes, my boyfriend's girlfriend, my best mate's best friend. I need to be sort of a manager. I need to be responsible to the office like there's, there's a lot of role shifting happen for me. And actually, at the beginning of the show, I actually try and take off some of those hats, literally, and just put on the hat of sister. But it's an important ritual for me, because there's some vulnerability in that. And something I do always feel quite passionate about being able to say off stage about the show is that I think some people come who also have learned disabled family members or are learning disabled. And they look at the example of this 75 minutes, and they make loads of assumptions that A, my family's always been like that, and B, that we are always like that with Rachel all the time. And I can fundamentally say the show has changed us and how we are with Rachel. And I'm so grateful for those changes, but what we don't stage is like the difficulty of growing up in a household with a learning disabled person who we often misunderstood or who we just didn't have the tools like the 90s was just sort of like peak ableism happening at us all the time. My mum got told by some like, lovely kind Christians that Rachel have been sent as a as a lesson from God. I got told all the time that, right, it must be so hard to grow up with Rachel, and how awful that must be. And all of the kind of care systems have changed radically in the last 35 years of Rachel's life. And someone who comes with the lived experience that I have, or similar, or a parent or whatever. I never want them to come and feel like we've kind of, oh, they must do this all the time. They must just be like that as a family, the show has, like, radically changed us. And there are versions of the show that happen in my living room, you know, my mum's living room, like we do, improvise better with Rachel, and we listen to her more, and we listen to her more, and also she trusts us more, so she tells us more in the last sort of three or five years, or however long we've been working on it with her. What I hope about the show is that if you come and either you're someone who experiences difference, in which case, just enjoy the show, you don't need to learn it too much, but if you're somebody who has someone in your life who you perceive as being different in whatever way that could be, like a mum with dementia or a kid with ADHD, or a colleague who's autistic or whatever. Is it possible to just spend five minutes over a cup of tea, stepping into their world? There's this vulnerability that you mentioned in me having all of like, basically all my nuclear family on stage, and with that comes some boundaries around us, not going getting into that. Or do you remember when, like, Rachel used to pull my hair chronically as a kid, she was really into pulling my hair. I don't know if it's a sensory thing or like a lashing out thing, but she used to pull my hair so much that's not in the show, and she doesn't do that anymore. And she'd actually probably find it really funny. I shouldn't say this in front of her, because she'd probably say, Yeah, I want, I want that to be I want that to be the show. She finds violence really funny, but like, you know, we don't put those bits in in the show. And the other really funny thing about putting your mum and your sister on stage is that, by accident, people on press night, Rachel press this button that's called hallelujah on the first ever press night. And right at the end, she really waited. She gave us all these really high octane, funny, playful buttons. And I was going give them a sad song, Rachel, give them something to feel. You know, I lost my mind about 20 minutes in. She absolutely held them in this like high octane clown place. And then right at the end, she hit hallelujah as her finale. And what comes up is it's a video of my dad with his like village choir singing Hallelujah, very drunk that me and Rachel went to see at their like Christmas show in the village hall. And it's got pictures of Rachel and my dad when they were kids. And its sort of like it is a moment of honouring her relationship with our dad. But what I didn't realize was that, because when you put some of your nuclear family on stage. People assume things, people going up to my colleagues going, beautiful show. It's such a shame about Flo and Rachel's dad. And we were going, he's not dead. He's just a gardener. So, you know, there are these limits that I think audiences don't quite maybe read into of like, oh, maybe he just isn't a theatre person, and he has been in the room, he's been in the rehearsal room, he's been on tour with us, and all of those things, and the show has changed him too. But it's really funny to me. Like, I think people, because it is so personal, maybe assume that that's the 100% of our life is there, and then they fill in all the gaps. But of course, the gaps are filled with nuance and the grey areas of, you know, growing up with disabled sibling and being a Neurodivergent household and all of those things. And I always just want to say, you know, out loud, firstly, my dad's not dead. Secondly, and secondly, like, yeah, it is really celebratory and fun. And that's what Rachel wants to share. So that's what that's the bit that you get. Yeah.
Kate Lovell
Yes, it is so celebratory. It's so fun. And anarchic, and we've chatted before, and I've, I've said this, it's nothing like Panto, but it, it does have a sort of inhabits the world of chaos that I love about, about pantomime and shows like perfect show.
Flo O’Mahony
Rachel loves a pantomime, all of that kind of interaction, Rachel's got her own scripts. Like, instead of he's behind you, it's Rachel's in and you have to shout back Hornchurch or Manchester, or whatever, you know. So, she, I would say pantomime was Rachel's early theatre, as with many of us, I guess. But early, earliest theatre exposure, I played Cinderella and Rachel still watches the DVD, which is mortifying for me, because it's me going, That's not my name. It's terrible. But that kind of, I do agree with you, in the kind of, in some of those buttons, it's absolutely that kind of comedy and colour in Rachel's show. And then some of them, it's different.
Kate Lovell
Yes. And you mentioned press night, and you mentioned audience, and I wondered if you could say a little bit about how, how do the critics and how do audiences respond to Perfect Show?
Flo O’Mahony
I'm keen to talk about this in quite like, pragmatic way, which is that when we first started R&Ding this show, Rachel would hit a button and we'd all just sort of like, bop around the room to whatever song she'd pressed, or we'd kind of busk it, and everything was very like, it would happen in a function room out the side of Brighton Dome, or whatever, you know, like, that's literally where we were. And there's something about the scale of this show that matters to me, even though it's completely inconvenient. You know, you've booked the show at Hornchurch, so it's you have to be invested in the ways that this show will shape and change your audiences. You have to be invested in the impact it might have on the building before and after we're there and we come obviously, we come with the things, because the show is expensive, there are 13 people on stage. That is not a convenient thing to book, but there's something about that that speaks to this idea of, like, critical response or quality, which was that I really believe that if we were going to make this show, that people would come in with a story about what it meant to see Rachel's show and what it meant to be an audience member, which would be a bit like, isn't that really nice that Rachel's doing that, and aren't I really nice for coming? And I think we have that around accessible theatre a bit. And sure, like, there is social value in just showing up and being in solidarity with disabled artists 100% but I think if we're going to have longevity in disabled artists careers, or in the idea of mainstream audiences as well as disabled audiences engaging with this work, we also have to take it really seriously, and we have to have rigor, and we have to have a sense of caring greatly about the quality of the work. Now, I'm not sure if Rachel would mind if our fight scenes were completely unbelievable versus completely believable, but that's where my facilitation kind of comes in to broker the relationship between Rachel and the industry and to treat her art with respect and a sense that we might be able to reach perfection. Now, obviously, that's a really contentious word, but this idea that we might be able, well, what if we could stage a really good fight scene? What if we can do the choreography for dirty dancing, whatever it is. What if we really attend to in the same way we've attended to the improv, which is harder to perceive the polish of can we really attend to the design and the video and bring together an expensive show, I guess, at like, artistically expensive, and build this tech and not pack it, not pull any punches around our willingness to engage in its possible, its potential quality. I think we're in an interesting bit right now. I think three years ago we were in a bit as well, but I'll just talk to kind of the nowness of it, but where we're starting to need to get rigorous about disabled art. Like I think five or six years ago, there was a shift of, just like, we really need more of it to be happening. We need more people to be coming in. Maybe 10 years ago. Maybe I'm too young to know the full timeline, or whatever, but there's, there was a surge. Like, Arts Council prioritised access and inclusion. Great, more disabled and deaf and Neurodivergent artists come into the field. Great. I think we're in the like now what bit, because we're noticing with funding dwindling and with audiences behaviours changing and all of these things, it's not enough to just say this work exists because it should. It also has to exist because it's good. And I think that's hard. I think there's some folks who are really feeling the extraction of disabled artists from getting from jobs, because I think there are less jobs. But also, I think that that there's a sense of like the trend has changed slightly, which is really grim and awful. But in that, I think one of the only ways that I can see to respond, partly because the rest of it's not fully in my control. I can kind of campaign for more funding for the arts, but I can't necessarily press a button and make it all happen. Is to make sure that the art that we make in these spaces is good or is able to be critiqued. So how did Rachel’s show land? It got five stars in The Guardian, which meant that we just sold out at the Barbican. We got fours and fives almost around the clock. And I think there's something in that for me, about five stars in the Guardian is something that I've never achieved in my career as director. But there's something about being able to say actually the show is good. Come because you want to see a good show, and then, you know, do your weird feeling like a good person stuff at it if you want to, but like, come because you want to be entertained. I have performed in this show now, I think 37 times or something like that. It is electric every night. I've never had a show where I think, oh, this scene again. And, and I want people to know that that that is how it is. And it's been re-reviewed. We just had a press night in Manchester on our tour. And British theatre guide who don't do stars, which is probably a good thing, but I quite like the stars, wrote a glowing review about what the show means, and kind of really dug into its practice. The one thing I'm curious about is I would love to read a non-ableist critique, I would be really curious about reading like a two star review, where they weren't saying, I didn't I didn't like the culture of the show, like, I didn't like Rachel's repetition, or, you know, where they weren't pulling apart Rachel's being in an ableist way, where they were actually really grappling with her as an artist and saying, like, I think this could have done with more of this. Or I think that this design or movement or quality could have been greater, you know, kind of, I think we are a bit afraid of critiquing disabled work, and although that can be good in the short run, and I actually do feel like the five stars from The Guardian was genuine and legit. I've not, you know, understood the social, the social impact of the show, but also engaged with its quality. I do think we need to be able to critique disabled artists with context, with nuance, with intersectional kind of understanding. But I think there's maybe been a bit where we just go like we'll just do standing ovation, rounds of applause, because the work is happening. And now I think we audiences are going to get a bit more savvy, rightly so, because we would want them too surely. We want to be artists. We want to be engaged with in this way. And I think that probably comes with being able to hear feedback about our work and have it given by people who are informed by other disabled critics, by, you know, by people who aren't stumbling around with their ableism or their inherent misunderstanding about what theatre is. It's a real word of mouth show, and people tend to come back, which I really love, especially our Neurodivergent audiences, because there's this sense of like ritual, of like, I know what the beginning is going to be, and I kind of know some of the buttons, like, like, I've got, like, familiarity, or like an insider goss, like, in Manchester last week, someone went “do the EastEnders button”, and Lee went, she doesn't take requests, but because they wanted to see that scene again. And there's something really fun about that. And then they are with us on the journey of like, oh, my God, they had to do that button three times yesterday. Now they're having to do it again. Or, wow, I'd never seen that button before, whatever. So, there's this, like, sense of the unknown. It's really not a show that drowns in the weight of its own sincerity. It's not worthy or preachy. It's not a TED Talk. It's not a PowerPoint about disabled people. It is totally this kind of zany, wacky, silly, fun show that I think makes people think about their family, whether they have a disabled family member or not.
Kate Lovell
Yeah, totally. And I'm in an interesting position now where I'm thrilled that we're here at Queens Theatre Hornchurch taking the show, but I'd say that maybe we don't have an audience in the same way that I'm going to I'm going to cast assumptions that the Donmar might have a very Guardian reading audience.
Flo O’Mahony
Yeah, it's different. It speaks differently to different people. And that's what I mean about the Barbican audience like they called me and said, get your comps requested, this is going to sell out. And I went, what do you mean? What do you mean? Like, I've had reviews be really great, but I've been in Croydon, and people don't give a fuck about the Barbican or the Donmar or whatever they those audiences really pay attention to it. But you're right. Like, we have to be able to talk about this show to your audience in the way that will reach them and that they care about. And rightly so, you should be discerning about a guardian review. It doesn't necessarily mean it necessarily mean anything.
Kate Lovell
And one of the ways that I think will be helpful here in Hornchurch, because we have such a loyal and panto loving audience, and that is probably the closest that is easy to say it's like this.
Flo O’Mahony
yeah, and you guys have really innovated around accessing your pantomimes, right? Like you do a lot of BSL integration, and you've done loads of loads of really cool stuff.
Kate Lovell
Yeah, I've only been here a couple of years, so I can't really speak to things before me, but I, when I started, I really wanted to take on panto because of the audience, and because of who comes through the door.
Flo O’Mahony
It's a really good place to change people into people who love theatre. And therefore, if you've also got some great like social, political undertones to that, it's also a really great place to have that in a really fun and joyful and collective feeling way, like what a great place to do it.
Kate Lovell
I know that people will have an amazing time, but I must admit talking to not necessarily audiences, but just people who might be working in theatre, I feel like people don't quite believe that it's not going to be worthy in some way. Yeah, and there's a sort of taking go, well, look, it is inherently political, but just forget that, because it's bloody fun. And like I have my I've only seen it once, but I loved the snack cabaret, and I'm secretly hoping I might get to see that.
Flo O’Mahony
And, yeah, me too, I love snack cabaret. It's a song with all of Rachel's favourite snacks vying for her attention, and then she picks one, and she gets to eat the snack on stage. And it's really good.
Kate Lovell
It's just brilliant. And, like, it is a little bit like, yeah, yeah. It's directed by disabled performer. It's really important. But also…
Flo O’Mahony
I know it's really It's why I was so pleased that you asked me about Lee's practice, because it's like, if you love Whose Line Is It Anyway, come basically, we're playing games with Rachel on stage, and I think we've become a bit sensitive to theatre that we arrive at and we get told we're a bad person out we get told we've never thought about this thing before, which is crazy, because we bought a ticket, so we must have thought about it at least when we were buying the ticket. And we get told like you have to change. And really, I don't, I don't think we've done ourselves a service by making lots of disabled artists feel like that's the work they have to make, like that they have to make awareness driving pieces. And now we're in this bit where, like you say, we kind of have to change the tide on how people approach a piece like perfect show, which is absolutely Rachel could not be less interested in telling you the statistic about the disabled experience. And yet, people kind of have this idea about what disabled art is, and I think we did. We made we made some, I imagine most marginalised communities feel like this in theatre, but the early stage of a lot of disabled artists careers, we told them, you just have to make a piece about who you are and your identity and how hard it is and how awful it is. And then we start to go, oh, all disabled theatre is going to be that. And that's everyone should make their big I am piece. I have no qualms about that, like we all need to say who we are as artists. And it's a huge, sort of manifest manifesto moment where we get to make that solo show that's all about our weird intersection of our identities. But then what do you make next? What do you make after that? And how do you be supported to feel like you are more interesting than just the marginalisation you experience in the world And I hope we can get that message across for your audiences, but I think you have put your fingertips on something very sensitive in in the disabled arts space at the moment, which is that audience is a little bit afraid that they're going to get told off. Yeah, totally. And they might get told off, but it would be by Rachel telling them not clapping loud enough. I was going to say, actually, Rachel's just, we've just taken out the words. And of course, this is a relaxed performance from my announcement. Now, of course, that now, of course, that, of course, it is a relaxed performance, and we, we really mean that, but it feels a bit um. It feels like we can't really say that up top of the show, because Rachel really might just turn to the audience and say, I want to talk to boys, and then we have to manage the consent and the non-misgendering of our audience and go, is there a boy who'd like to talk to Rachel? Or like, the other day, she stopped this EastEnders scene that she has a lot of directorial input into. She said, Cut. And then she looked at the audience, and I went, did you want to talk to the audience? Rachel? She normally tells an actor, like, loud or quiet, and then she chooses, or whatever the direction is. And she turned to the audience, I said, do you want to talk to them? And I was ready to say, oh, Rachel wants you to laugh louder, or something like that, which is also not a very relaxed performance vibe, but Rachel does want the audience to interact with her work. Militantly. She turned and she went loud or naughty to the audience. And I went, I don't know Rachel loud or naughty, and she went naughty, and the audience in Manchester went feral. It was like 20 seconds of pandemonium. We had people stamping, shouting, throwing things like going absolutely mental. I had to say, like, don't do anything that will get us sued. You got 10 seconds before the scene ends, 321, and they went mad. And it was so fun to watch an audience really want to join in with Rachel's vision as well, because she's got this, like, diva energy. It's why the second time, because you spoke about this worthiness, the first time we made anything to kind of share the process, it was like a backstage documentary, and it's all of us saying, like, because we're terrified, like, we're really scared of the show before we made it, we were like, this might be terrible, you know, we might be doing a bad thing. And it was all us being like, you know, accessible tech is so important and so nice to get to know Rachel. And it's really sweet and really gentle and soft. The second video we put out when we'd already made the show when we came back the second time is a Mean Girls documentary, like trailer. It's us being like, talking about Rachel as if she's Regina George, and bigging her up as this complete, like, diva, because we were, like, people have this idea of worthiness, but there's just not what the energy that Rachel brings, like, she brings this kind of like, sasspot, it girl energy, and she acts like a celebrity the whole time. It's like, it's so fun. So yeah, we've kind of changed how we talk about the show as well.
Kate Lovell
You mentioned disabled for disabled artists, what's next? And it made me think you've worked on the show for 10 years. It's out on tour now. What is next?
Flo O’Mahony
What is next for Rachel or for Zoo Co?
Kate Lovell
I think both really like for Rachel and it is a show that could tour forever is that what Rachel wants is that what Zoo Co wants?
Flo O’Mahony
We've said that for now. The strategy is we'll tour for as long as Rachel wants to. Now it doesn't seem like Rachel's slowing down in any way. She's obsessed with doing the show. This is a really nice sporadic tour, so she gets it spread out over almost a year that we've had interest from international festival bookers. It's expensive and a hard grind to bring together, and the artists involved sacrifice a lot to book a tour like this. We've got artists who've agreed to do this sporadic tour, which means that they couldn't take a Christmas gig, and they've still prioritized the show over a Christmas gig, which is phenomenal and extraordinary, and I think speaks to the show's value artistically for them.
Kate Lovell
Now I know why Stephen Colin said he couldn't audition for me.
Flo O’Mahony
He is doing a Christmas show, but yes, you're right, people that had to say no to stuff and that that's very moving for me, that people are willing to do that with my sister and with this show in terms of Rachel, Rachel will continue to be a theatre person. I think it's probably the iterations of this show will morph and change with her. Maybe this is my lack of imagination, but right now, what I'd say is this show is the singular alchemy that came together for Rachel to be able to do the job she's doing, and that really anything else, like if we said, Okay, what's Rachel's take on Romeo and Juliet would be a downgrade of her total leadership. So of course, Rachel might evolve and change and surprise me, and I hope she does, but I imagine that we, you know, we say at the beginning of show, theatre is not Rachel's only priority. She can leave at any time she might go to go get a burger from McDonald's or whatever, because Rachel isn't looking to have a career in the arts. She has paid for her work on this, and that is a whole can of worms with benefits and, you know, all of that kind of stuff. But really the show is the project for her. And then, in terms of Zoo Co, we are underneath Perfect Show for Rachel. We are R&Ding, our new show, which I am so excited about. I can't get too much into it right now, but it is kind of a follow up response to the question of, what do you do after you've made a show, like perfect show which has this electric liveness and these buttons and this thing. So, it's kind of another button Show. It's kind of another live director on stage show. It's going to be really improv focused, but it's based on an endurance competition in the 80s in America. So, it's different, and it's a real, it's a true story, and we're collaborating with Lee again, and it's so exciting, I like, can't wait to make it. It's a slightly smaller show in that there's still six people on stage and a gigantic 30-foot structure. Hopefully, if I get my way. We're also making a studio piece that is currently working title is called slug play, and that's looking at Neurodivergent female friendship through the lens of a nature documentary maker who kind of goes into silo in her little flat in London, and kind of looking at that. And we're also R&Ding a couple of other pieces, so we are, like generative at the moment, and I think perfect show is such a teaching for us in what our process needs to be, how we want to make work, how where the balance sits between new writing and improvisational liveness on stage. We always want a bit of a balance between those things in some way, although some of our work is scripted and some of it isn't, and I just feel like we're in this really exciting bit where it we're in this post Perfect Show for Rachel chapter, because this show has been so big and such an identity factor for the company. And that was the point of the award that we got right at the beginning was to allow theatre companies to make a major step change in their practice. And it was, I mean, we'd never put this many people on stage before. We'd never received commissioning in this way, in quite this way, before. And we're touring main, main stages around the country now for, you know, weeklong or two weeklong residencies. And that feels incredible. So, we've kind of made all of the pre covid slate happen, and now we're in this new slate of ideas that is just so rich and so nourishing. And I'm so lucky to be able to work across so many ideas that reflect so much, many different parts of what I care about, politically, globally, personally, socially, artistically, most importantly, artistically. thank you.
Kate Lovell
Thank you so much for your time today, Flo Thank you for listening, and it's goodbye from us.
Flo O’Mahony
Yeah, thank you so much. Bye.
Outro
Thank you for listening. We do hope you've enjoyed this episode of Disability and… Perfect Show for Rachel is touring to Hornchurch, Sheffield, Birmingham, Oxford and Leeds in 2026 please visit the Zoo Co website at wearezooco.co.uk, for dates and times. Further episodes of Disability and… can be found on the Disability Arts Online website at disabilityarts.online.
Welcome to the Disability and... podcast bringing together thoughtful discussion and debate. This month, writer, dramaturg and director, Kate Lovell chats with artistic director of Zoo Co theatre, Flo O’Mahony, about Perfect Show for Rachel, which is currently on tour. This show contains strong language.
Kate Lovell
Hello and welcome to the Disability and... podcast. My name is Kate Lovell, and I am delighted to be joined by Flo O’Mahony, who is artistic director of Zoo Co, and she's here with us today to talk all things. Perfect show for Rachel, hi, Flo.
Flo O’Mahony
Yes, Hello, Kate. How are you doing?
Kate Lovell
I'm well. How are you?
Flo O’Mahony
I'm good. Thank you. I'm really excited to chat to you today.
Kate Lovell
So Perfect Show for Rachel. Our listeners may be a cult fan who's seen it five times, or they may not have heard of it. So, could you give us a brief overview of what Perfect Show for Rachel is?
Flo O’Mahony
Yes, I can do my best. So Perfect Show for Rachel is a show that I've made with my sister Rachel. So, although I’m the Artistic Director of Zoo Co really for the for the purposes of this conversation, I'm just Rachel's sister. Rachel is learning disabled. She lives in a care home, and she's always been really excited by theatre. She's the reason that we started touring all of our performances as relaxed as standard, because she doesn't give a shit about the uptight rules of being in a British theatre audience anyway, so if she came, it would be relaxed, because she wouldn't be following those rules anyway. And we found that when Rachel came and when we said, oh, this is relaxed performance, the work got obviously more inclusive, and that's great, but for our artistic selves, it also became more crackly and alive and electric. And we've kind of been chasing that feeling, that sense that we are humans talking to humans in a room on stage for the whole time. So about 10 years ago, I had a thought about what it might be like to make a show that was something to do with Rachel. Now my caveat is there are quite a lot of siblings of learning disabled people who work in the arts, you can make of that what you will. I imagine we all need a little bit of the love and attention, but I was pretty sure that other artists had already articulated the experience of being someone's sibling and my disability politic and my artistic curiosity was more interested in what it might be like to make art that Rachel would be part of or respond to, or something like that. I didn't know what the show would become. So, it was really just that question of, what if Rachel was in the room? Anyway, we got her into the New Diorama. Years ago, we did our first three days of R and D, and it was so clear that she was going to steal my job as a director. And the second that happened, it was like, oh, whoa. You know, I wish I'd thought of that, you know, before I'd got her in a room, but I had to wait to see that she wanted to be in charge. And that kind of changed everything I thought I might be making a one woman show, sort of for and with Rachel, and with Rachel as the director. Suddenly, of course, the pyramid of how you make theatre just crumbled. So, if you put Rachel at the helm of something, things like, should we make this play? Is it ethical to make this play? Can we make a play? How might we do that? What tech does Rachel need to make decisions and lead? And Rachel's inherent way of being was one that was not going to stay on script. And so putting a script there would have been counter to her being in charge. So now the show is, can we step into Rachel's world for 75 minutes and be led by her live on stage every night? So, she sits at the side of the stage, facing the actors and the audience. Half the time, actually, she's very interested by them. At this gigantic tech desk with like 50 different massive buttons, she looks like she's going to launch a rocket into space, and each one triggers something different that Rachel wants us to show you. So, it might be like a video or a song or a dance or a game or a chat. And she also is mic’d, so she can verbally direct us if she wants to. That's not always accessible for her, but she can. Her voice is scribed as if it's kind of poetry in the Bible. So, she talks all the way through the show. So, we have these scribe screens, so you know what she's saying. And the whole performance is like poppy, colourful, campy, fun, slapstick, violent, grimy, these buttons the way that they kind of pop up, and then in between those buttons, sometimes Rachel doesn't press a button for five or 10 minutes or longer, and there might be audience interaction or a conversation, and it's grown and grown. So when we first previewed the show, I think there was like about 20 buttons on the desk, and now I think we're touring with about 40 plus some kind of rogue easter egg things that aren't on the desk, but Rachel might just trigger verbally. So, it's got Kylie Minogue drag acts. It's got fart jokes, which I hate, but it's not my show, so we have to do them. It's got fight scenes that my mum, who's on stage as Rachel's carer, gets involved in. She finishes off a big pub brawl. It's amazing. We've got dirty dancing, we've got the streets singing, who's got the bag? So like, it's not just maybe the assumptions you might make about what a learning disabled adult might like, which is often, people often project an idea around taste making from learning disabled makers that Rachel sometimes absolutely falls into. Like she loves Disney and colour and campy pop panto land, but she also really likes us all telling each other to shut up, to Stormzy Shut up. And she really likes who's got the bag, and there's a button where it just says, Why don't you get a job? and we sing The Offsprings, Why don't you get a job? to the musical director who's playing the song, and suddenly he realizes he's in the firing line. So it's like, it's a show that makes me have to really think about my family, and I think it's a bit like that with audiences as well. There's real sisters on stage. I've got my work sister Fleur, who's one of my best mates, and co-founders of Zoo Co in the show. Lee's in the show. My mum's on stage. My boyfriend is currently touring with us, sometimes supporting us, and a kind of care level for Rachel, but he ends up getting roped in because she quite likes him. And then there's this incredible cast of people, and they're like really established performers, actually a local to you in Hornchurch is Stephen Collins in rehearsals. We always call him Stephen Collin's from Dune because he was in the Dune movies. The musical director is one of the co-founders of Showstopper. So I kind of think when I describe the show, I want to talk about its heartbeat, but also want to talk about its quality and this kind of amazing crew of people who've done like West End musicals and performed in Showstopper, and they're still willing to come and kind of get the artistic shit beaten out of them by my big sister myself heavily included in that I'm often the butt of every joke, but yeah, so that's my rundown of the show today, really.
Kate Lovell
Thank you, absolutely. And I'm fortunate enough to have seen the show when it was at the Pit in the Barbican, but a number of years ago, so I was really excited when you said there's twice as many buttons. Thinking when I next see it, it will be very different,
Flo O’Mahony
And Rachel's really different. I mean, when you would have seen it, would have been when we were there with the Oxford Samuel Beckett theatre trust award, and we just did eight shows, and we didn't even know if when the audience walked in, Rachel might walk out, like we really didn't know how it was going to go, and she was very much reliant on the desk as her main mode of communication so she could trigger something and then her words might be something like, this is for Rachel, I like it, or what are you doing, Flo? But now, cut to three years later, she has come back into the show with a vengeance, so she's like extremely verbally communicative in the show, to the point where we realized that the desk wasn't giving her enough directorial input. So we now have a mechanism where she can say cut at any time, and then I pull out a director's menu, and if she wants it, I whisper to her, Do you want them to be loud or quiet, or big or small or angry or fall over or kill someone or hit someone, and so she can really pick the nuance and details of each button now, whereas before, she was kind of just really excited to hit the buttons, now she hits the buttons and she wants to control them. And most recently, that led to her also directing her audience, which was amazing. She's growing into her directorial persona and learning what she can assert control over, which is everything really.
Kate Lovell
And when you're talking just then, it struck me how the show is obviously political, inherently because of putting a learning disabled person at the absolute centre and as director, but it's also really blowing apart the walls on what can be enigmatic world of theatre, especially director as a role. Which, I think, yes, people don't necessarily know what a director does, but when you said about that menu, you know.
Flo O’Mahony
Especially in artistic spaces that are focused on access and inclusion, you'll know this because you also are in this, you're a director of accessible theatre. We want to be kind in our practice. We don't want to uphold the traditional stereotypes of what directing can be. And then Rachel comes in. She's like a generous dictator. I don't even know if she's generous. She wants what she wants, and she's clear about it, and she's given me this without ever poking fun or excluding someone intentionally or whatever. She doesn't uphold any of the ickiness of being that. But she is so meticulous about what she wants, and she'll tell you, and she tells you clearly. And I think there's something I've learned. About how to hold an accessible practice, which is, it does not have to be at the softening of your artistic edge. Of course, your politic has to be super strong. But I think I've spent sometimes thinking, oh, maybe the art can compromise, because I don't want to be unkind, whereas actually Rachel is kind of kind in her clarity. It's the only show I've ever worked on where because our director is super clear and understanding Rachel is a whole skill that the whole company has had to learn how to listen and how to understand her on a very deep level, not just a linguistic one, which isn't always where her plane of communication is, but actually, if we tune into her, she's super clear and she's black and white about what she wants. And if we're just listening enough, then that's crispy, clean. And it's so relieving to work on a show with such an inherently clear audience, one person, just Rachel. We tell the audience, it's a bonus if you happen to enjoy it, but it's really just for Rachel, and as an artist, that's been incredibly relieving, because I've spent a lot of years. I'm sure every director can relate to this going, what will people think? How can I make sure everything's okay for everyone? And Rachel doesn't worry herself with that, partly because she can't, but partly because she doesn't want to. And that clarity is something that I've actually brought, you know, trying to bring into my own practice. How can I be super clear about what I want? I'm really in touch with my gut, not just my sort of I don't have got this sort of persona of becoming like the village MP where I just want everything to be okay in the rehearsal room. And actually, Rachel's meticulousness has taught me a lot about how relieving that can be for a group of artists to go it's really clear what you want, and you're telling me, and it's hard, yes, I've got to do the Dirty Dancing lift nine times today. I've got to run a fight scene where I fall over 15 times because you've told me to. But at the end of the day, I know I've done my job. And that's like beautiful clarity, I think, especially in a very Neurodivergent room, that clarity is so welcome.
Kate Lovell
Yes, oh, absolutely. I really relate to a lot of what you were talking about, about directing and on this show, obviously, you're, you're, you're not directing, but you are facilitating, along with other artists, and your show is out on tour, and you're you've partnered with Improbable for this phase of work. I wondered how that collaboration came about.
Flo O’Mahony
Oh yeah, I get a bit soppy whenever I talk about working with Lee, and he's not here, so he can't cringe at me and tell me that it's too much. But Lee Simpson co AD of improbable came into my life actually really weird back story, and it's totally a nepotism story, but I do think that people can meet Lee out in the wild, so don't feel too guilty about it, but my best mate, when I was five, moved to the house next door to Lee and Janita. Over the years, my mum got to know Janita, and therefore I got to know Lee a little bit. And when I was about 19, I got to shadow one of his processes with Angela Clerkin on The Bear. And I was not ready for it. I wasn't ready for the way that his practice would slowly over the next decade, infiltrate my life. But they were working in open space. They were working with improvisation and devising on a really like, grown up show. These were really grown up, established artists. And they kept saying things like, well, I don't know. Or, well, I feel like doing this now, or, oh, I've got to take a rest now. And I was like, What the hell is this? I'm a real control freak. You can tell that the whole way through the show, there's no there's no secret in the fact that I find it really hard to give away control, but I watched this kind of non-hierarchical, deeply alive practice kind of unfold, and I was totally not ready. I went, Yeah, yeah, that's great. But at drama school, I learned how to do all these other things, so it took me a long time to kind of come round to that way of being, and really what Lee being my mentor felt like, and it was sort of a tacit agreement between us was he would take me for a really sad lunch at the Edinburgh Fringe, normally three weeks in, and asked me how I was doing. And, of course, I was always like, chronically depressed and ill in ill health, because it was the fringe. And occasionally I'd call him for some advice on how to be kind, whilst you tell someone they're not going to get a part or, you know, whatever, just like whatever big problem was in me, I would sometimes call him and ask. He'd always say he didn't know, and then he'd say something so wise about his own experience of that thing that I would kind of come away a bit better at dealing with those things, which I'm so grateful for. And I kind of credit him with the reason that I have become like 50% less of an arsehole in my life. I'm sure there's still lots of arseholery to kind of go but the thing about him is that he really trusts in the instinct and self-realisation of the artists he works with. So, when I started talking to him about Perfect Show, it took me a couple of years of these Edinburgh lunches to say, could you help me with this? Because I realised Rachel wasn't going to work to a script. And he said, Actually, yeah, I think this is the first show that I could really be useful to you on. When we first brought people together to make this show, I thought we might get cancelled. I might harm my sister. I've really checked all these things. I've really worked hard to topple all the potential problems that could come up. We had that show that got known as puppetgate at the Southwark Playhouse, who really harmed autistic audiences in, I think, where they felt like they were doing their best to tell a story that they told harmfully. We had a session on the wall in early R and D. How are we making sure Rachel isn't a puppet? And really, Lee's practice underpins the entire thing, I think, at every moment where I got scared as an artist and thought, well, we'll have to organize how the show's going to end. We'll have to give her a finale button. He would say, I think we should let Rachel improvise her ending. Oh, yeah, you're right. Oh, I have to write a 10-page essay that I read to the audience at the beginning, so they know all of the things we've thought about. And we, you know, they can't think there's no stone left unturned. It was like, kind of like an insurance monologue at the beginning of the show. How can I make sure everyone knows that we have thought about it? And he went, I don't think you need to tell them that. I think the show, you know, and he was always this, this person underpinning that. And what's more, when I say improvisation, I really only know it through the Improbable lens. And I've learned lots from Phelim and from Matilda, the other two co ADs as well, but they mean it in this slow, electric, alive way. How can we use improvisation? And someone said this to me at Improbable, they said, oh, we think improv can change the world. And I went, you old hippie. And now I've seen how if I improvise with Rachel, I stopped scripting how I want her to be. I stopped writing how a joke should end, or how I think what I think success looks like in an artistic or social lens. And I start taking what she offers me, and I actually say yes, and I actually build on that. And if I can do that, then actually the world does change a bit for Rachel, at least, and then the people around her, and then the community around that family, and then her care home. And really, he'd done all this work. He'd done a really deep version of therapy with some friends autistic daughter. She's non-verbal. This is back in the 90s, so really different language around those things, but it was intense interaction that was entirely about working on yourself, not on the person, so not hoping that that person would change, noticing how you were and spending hours kind of addressing the ableism we all have in us about how disabled people should be and how we really want someone to talk to us. We really want eye contact. We really want you know, we have this almost urgency around Can you be a bit less disabled around people who we perceive as being profoundly disabled in some way? And he'd also made a show called Coma, where they explored, is it possible to improvise with somebody who was in a coma or dream, like the state and that kind of blew out of the water. Any ideas I had about Rachel not being collaborative enough, like if you can improvise with somebody who's in a coma, if you can kind of use what they use is Arnie Mindell's world work process to apply it in a performative performance kind of setting. He's this kind of psychiatrist practitioner, so not a theatre maker. But if you can apply that to someone in a coma, who I have made lots of assumptions about in my life, and maybe anyone listening might make the same be really tricky to improvise with someone in a coma. How on earth would I go about that, if I can work on this micro level with someone in a coma, if Lee and Phelim have explored that and shared bits of that in our process. Then working with Rachel is a walk in the park, she gives so much. She's so generous. This improvisational practice isn't just us playing silly games on stage, which we also do, and Rachel loves it's not just that kind of sport, sporty version of improv. Underneath it is, can I be okay not knowing what's going to happen in the next second or minute or hour? And Lee has really done all that. But it was so funny. I was saying, like, I got scared a lot in the rehearsal process. Like one day Rachel came in, she was unwell and she had the wrong carer next to her, and the tech wasn't working and her video wasn't on, and she's kind of pissed off with us. It was just before we went to the Barbican for the first time. Oh, and the Barbican was so fretting about getting cancelled that they asked us to think about a mechanism for how if someone thought that we'd been exploiting Rachel in the rehearsal room, how they could know that we hadn't because they wanted to be able to interview Rachel. And we were like, that's not going to work for Rachel. She's not a question-and-answer girly. So instead, we decided to pay disabled peer reviewers to come in and witness the process, so this day they're all in and. My pressure is, you know, I want to impress the disabled artists we're paying to come in and respond creatively. And the whole point is, they respond to what they really see, not what we hope they see or whatever. Anyway, Rachel comes in, and she directs, like a 15-minute version of the show. And then she goes, and it's really flat, no songs, no games, just like a couple of buttons. And she goes, it is finished, and I go, do you want a song? Do you want to dance like? I've kind of prepared for Rachel not coming on stage. There's a version of the show that can happen if she ever chose not to which she never has. And I've prepared for Rachel loving the show and us having to tell her it's finished, but hadn't prepared for her having, like, a grumpy show, because anyone can, and there were all of these reasons that she was grumpy and I freaked out. I just went, No, no, no, no, no. We're going to get people asking for refunds. It's going to be awful. They're going to think that Rachel's unhappy, you know, it's going to basically, a complete ego meltdown of everyone's going to blame me. And Lee sort of looked at me and went, this is really hard, but Rachel's reminding us that she's in charge and that she might say no if we get it wrong, and the techs not working, and she's got the wrong carer, and she's feeling poorly and her TV's not on, and she's reminding us she doesn't just accept anything that comes. She's not willing to take our shit version of the show. She wants the full thing, and if she doesn't get it, she's a meticulous director who's going to say no. And those kind of moments Lee has really rescued me into; how do I fold this possibility into how do I bring this about in the show? How do we accept what's really happening in Rachel and work with that? And yeah, maybe the audience could have seen that show, and it would have been uncomfortable, but they would have still been seeing us respond to Rachel, rather than me at the end, going, are you sure it's done? Do you want to dance? You know, and so it's sort of guidance how to live your life. And I would prescribe time in a workshop with Lee to pretty much anyone for like a world that's more attuned to what's really happening, able to be responsive and also just softer and kinder and gentler than most of the ways we treat ourselves in the arts. And I do think that that's the Zoo Co Improbable merge. So Improbable practice underpins all of this liveness in the show. And we have made a lot more accessible theatre on purpose, and Improbable have done amazing stuff with lots of disabled artists, but our work really had that kind of we knew how to make a deaf and hearing piece. The piece is bilingual. We knew about captioning. We knew about how to support Rachel, and the people supporting Rachel and the space is full of, unsurprisingly, in a show where you just have to be okay being in the shit every night, the show is full of people with different access needs who think differently. So, there's a lot of Neurodivergent folks in our company. And I think people often look at the show and go, there's Rachel and there's the Deaf performer, but actually there's a whole myriad of different access needs. And you know, Zoo Co knew how to make that work for those artists. I hope, of course, we still get it wrong sometimes.
Kate Lovell
It sounds to me like it was really important to have you know, this is your sister. You mentioned that your mum is involved in the show. It's so deeply personal that having an artist alongside you who has a little bit one step removed.
Flo O’Mahony
Absolutely we get a great wellbeing offer on this tour, and I've taken it up. I'm doing six sessions. So, I was telling the woman about my job on the show, and she said, I've just counted. And I think you have 13 different hats on, and it's true, I have artistic director, I have, like, a safety thing around being a CEO. I'm a performer. I have to sing, which is like a whole different hat for me, because I can't I need to think about the BSL, and I'm constantly looking at the deaf access. I need to be Rachel's sister. I need to be my mom's daughter. I need to be, sometimes, my boyfriend's girlfriend, my best mate's best friend. I need to be sort of a manager. I need to be responsible to the office like there's, there's a lot of role shifting happen for me. And actually, at the beginning of the show, I actually try and take off some of those hats, literally, and just put on the hat of sister. But it's an important ritual for me, because there's some vulnerability in that. And something I do always feel quite passionate about being able to say off stage about the show is that I think some people come who also have learned disabled family members or are learning disabled. And they look at the example of this 75 minutes, and they make loads of assumptions that A, my family's always been like that, and B, that we are always like that with Rachel all the time. And I can fundamentally say the show has changed us and how we are with Rachel. And I'm so grateful for those changes, but what we don't stage is like the difficulty of growing up in a household with a learning disabled person who we often misunderstood or who we just didn't have the tools like the 90s was just sort of like peak ableism happening at us all the time. My mum got told by some like, lovely kind Christians that Rachel have been sent as a as a lesson from God. I got told all the time that, right, it must be so hard to grow up with Rachel, and how awful that must be. And all of the kind of care systems have changed radically in the last 35 years of Rachel's life. And someone who comes with the lived experience that I have, or similar, or a parent or whatever. I never want them to come and feel like we've kind of, oh, they must do this all the time. They must just be like that as a family, the show has, like, radically changed us. And there are versions of the show that happen in my living room, you know, my mum's living room, like we do, improvise better with Rachel, and we listen to her more, and we listen to her more, and also she trusts us more, so she tells us more in the last sort of three or five years, or however long we've been working on it with her. What I hope about the show is that if you come and either you're someone who experiences difference, in which case, just enjoy the show, you don't need to learn it too much, but if you're somebody who has someone in your life who you perceive as being different in whatever way that could be, like a mum with dementia or a kid with ADHD, or a colleague who's autistic or whatever. Is it possible to just spend five minutes over a cup of tea, stepping into their world? There's this vulnerability that you mentioned in me having all of like, basically all my nuclear family on stage, and with that comes some boundaries around us, not going getting into that. Or do you remember when, like, Rachel used to pull my hair chronically as a kid, she was really into pulling my hair. I don't know if it's a sensory thing or like a lashing out thing, but she used to pull my hair so much that's not in the show, and she doesn't do that anymore. And she'd actually probably find it really funny. I shouldn't say this in front of her, because she'd probably say, Yeah, I want, I want that to be I want that to be the show. She finds violence really funny, but like, you know, we don't put those bits in in the show. And the other really funny thing about putting your mum and your sister on stage is that, by accident, people on press night, Rachel press this button that's called hallelujah on the first ever press night. And right at the end, she really waited. She gave us all these really high octane, funny, playful buttons. And I was going give them a sad song, Rachel, give them something to feel. You know, I lost my mind about 20 minutes in. She absolutely held them in this like high octane clown place. And then right at the end, she hit hallelujah as her finale. And what comes up is it's a video of my dad with his like village choir singing Hallelujah, very drunk that me and Rachel went to see at their like Christmas show in the village hall. And it's got pictures of Rachel and my dad when they were kids. And its sort of like it is a moment of honouring her relationship with our dad. But what I didn't realize was that, because when you put some of your nuclear family on stage. People assume things, people going up to my colleagues going, beautiful show. It's such a shame about Flo and Rachel's dad. And we were going, he's not dead. He's just a gardener. So, you know, there are these limits that I think audiences don't quite maybe read into of like, oh, maybe he just isn't a theatre person, and he has been in the room, he's been in the rehearsal room, he's been on tour with us, and all of those things, and the show has changed him too. But it's really funny to me. Like, I think people, because it is so personal, maybe assume that that's the 100% of our life is there, and then they fill in all the gaps. But of course, the gaps are filled with nuance and the grey areas of, you know, growing up with disabled sibling and being a Neurodivergent household and all of those things. And I always just want to say, you know, out loud, firstly, my dad's not dead. Secondly, and secondly, like, yeah, it is really celebratory and fun. And that's what Rachel wants to share. So that's what that's the bit that you get. Yeah.
Kate Lovell
Yes, it is so celebratory. It's so fun. And anarchic, and we've chatted before, and I've, I've said this, it's nothing like Panto, but it, it does have a sort of inhabits the world of chaos that I love about, about pantomime and shows like perfect show.
Flo O’Mahony
Rachel loves a pantomime, all of that kind of interaction, Rachel's got her own scripts. Like, instead of he's behind you, it's Rachel's in and you have to shout back Hornchurch or Manchester, or whatever, you know. So, she, I would say pantomime was Rachel's early theatre, as with many of us, I guess. But early, earliest theatre exposure, I played Cinderella and Rachel still watches the DVD, which is mortifying for me, because it's me going, That's not my name. It's terrible. But that kind of, I do agree with you, in the kind of, in some of those buttons, it's absolutely that kind of comedy and colour in Rachel's show. And then some of them, it's different.
Kate Lovell
Yes. And you mentioned press night, and you mentioned audience, and I wondered if you could say a little bit about how, how do the critics and how do audiences respond to Perfect Show?
Flo O’Mahony
I'm keen to talk about this in quite like, pragmatic way, which is that when we first started R&Ding this show, Rachel would hit a button and we'd all just sort of like, bop around the room to whatever song she'd pressed, or we'd kind of busk it, and everything was very like, it would happen in a function room out the side of Brighton Dome, or whatever, you know, like, that's literally where we were. And there's something about the scale of this show that matters to me, even though it's completely inconvenient. You know, you've booked the show at Hornchurch, so it's you have to be invested in the ways that this show will shape and change your audiences. You have to be invested in the impact it might have on the building before and after we're there and we come obviously, we come with the things, because the show is expensive, there are 13 people on stage. That is not a convenient thing to book, but there's something about that that speaks to this idea of, like, critical response or quality, which was that I really believe that if we were going to make this show, that people would come in with a story about what it meant to see Rachel's show and what it meant to be an audience member, which would be a bit like, isn't that really nice that Rachel's doing that, and aren't I really nice for coming? And I think we have that around accessible theatre a bit. And sure, like, there is social value in just showing up and being in solidarity with disabled artists 100% but I think if we're going to have longevity in disabled artists careers, or in the idea of mainstream audiences as well as disabled audiences engaging with this work, we also have to take it really seriously, and we have to have rigor, and we have to have a sense of caring greatly about the quality of the work. Now, I'm not sure if Rachel would mind if our fight scenes were completely unbelievable versus completely believable, but that's where my facilitation kind of comes in to broker the relationship between Rachel and the industry and to treat her art with respect and a sense that we might be able to reach perfection. Now, obviously, that's a really contentious word, but this idea that we might be able, well, what if we could stage a really good fight scene? What if we can do the choreography for dirty dancing, whatever it is. What if we really attend to in the same way we've attended to the improv, which is harder to perceive the polish of can we really attend to the design and the video and bring together an expensive show, I guess, at like, artistically expensive, and build this tech and not pack it, not pull any punches around our willingness to engage in its possible, its potential quality. I think we're in an interesting bit right now. I think three years ago we were in a bit as well, but I'll just talk to kind of the nowness of it, but where we're starting to need to get rigorous about disabled art. Like I think five or six years ago, there was a shift of, just like, we really need more of it to be happening. We need more people to be coming in. Maybe 10 years ago. Maybe I'm too young to know the full timeline, or whatever, but there's, there was a surge. Like, Arts Council prioritised access and inclusion. Great, more disabled and deaf and Neurodivergent artists come into the field. Great. I think we're in the like now what bit, because we're noticing with funding dwindling and with audiences behaviours changing and all of these things, it's not enough to just say this work exists because it should. It also has to exist because it's good. And I think that's hard. I think there's some folks who are really feeling the extraction of disabled artists from getting from jobs, because I think there are less jobs. But also, I think that that there's a sense of like the trend has changed slightly, which is really grim and awful. But in that, I think one of the only ways that I can see to respond, partly because the rest of it's not fully in my control. I can kind of campaign for more funding for the arts, but I can't necessarily press a button and make it all happen. Is to make sure that the art that we make in these spaces is good or is able to be critiqued. So how did Rachel’s show land? It got five stars in The Guardian, which meant that we just sold out at the Barbican. We got fours and fives almost around the clock. And I think there's something in that for me, about five stars in the Guardian is something that I've never achieved in my career as director. But there's something about being able to say actually the show is good. Come because you want to see a good show, and then, you know, do your weird feeling like a good person stuff at it if you want to, but like, come because you want to be entertained. I have performed in this show now, I think 37 times or something like that. It is electric every night. I've never had a show where I think, oh, this scene again. And, and I want people to know that that that is how it is. And it's been re-reviewed. We just had a press night in Manchester on our tour. And British theatre guide who don't do stars, which is probably a good thing, but I quite like the stars, wrote a glowing review about what the show means, and kind of really dug into its practice. The one thing I'm curious about is I would love to read a non-ableist critique, I would be really curious about reading like a two star review, where they weren't saying, I didn't I didn't like the culture of the show, like, I didn't like Rachel's repetition, or, you know, where they weren't pulling apart Rachel's being in an ableist way, where they were actually really grappling with her as an artist and saying, like, I think this could have done with more of this. Or I think that this design or movement or quality could have been greater, you know, kind of, I think we are a bit afraid of critiquing disabled work, and although that can be good in the short run, and I actually do feel like the five stars from The Guardian was genuine and legit. I've not, you know, understood the social, the social impact of the show, but also engaged with its quality. I do think we need to be able to critique disabled artists with context, with nuance, with intersectional kind of understanding. But I think there's maybe been a bit where we just go like we'll just do standing ovation, rounds of applause, because the work is happening. And now I think we audiences are going to get a bit more savvy, rightly so, because we would want them too surely. We want to be artists. We want to be engaged with in this way. And I think that probably comes with being able to hear feedback about our work and have it given by people who are informed by other disabled critics, by, you know, by people who aren't stumbling around with their ableism or their inherent misunderstanding about what theatre is. It's a real word of mouth show, and people tend to come back, which I really love, especially our Neurodivergent audiences, because there's this sense of like ritual, of like, I know what the beginning is going to be, and I kind of know some of the buttons, like, like, I've got, like, familiarity, or like an insider goss, like, in Manchester last week, someone went “do the EastEnders button”, and Lee went, she doesn't take requests, but because they wanted to see that scene again. And there's something really fun about that. And then they are with us on the journey of like, oh, my God, they had to do that button three times yesterday. Now they're having to do it again. Or, wow, I'd never seen that button before, whatever. So, there's this, like, sense of the unknown. It's really not a show that drowns in the weight of its own sincerity. It's not worthy or preachy. It's not a TED Talk. It's not a PowerPoint about disabled people. It is totally this kind of zany, wacky, silly, fun show that I think makes people think about their family, whether they have a disabled family member or not.
Kate Lovell
Yeah, totally. And I'm in an interesting position now where I'm thrilled that we're here at Queens Theatre Hornchurch taking the show, but I'd say that maybe we don't have an audience in the same way that I'm going to I'm going to cast assumptions that the Donmar might have a very Guardian reading audience.
Flo O’Mahony
Yeah, it's different. It speaks differently to different people. And that's what I mean about the Barbican audience like they called me and said, get your comps requested, this is going to sell out. And I went, what do you mean? What do you mean? Like, I've had reviews be really great, but I've been in Croydon, and people don't give a fuck about the Barbican or the Donmar or whatever they those audiences really pay attention to it. But you're right. Like, we have to be able to talk about this show to your audience in the way that will reach them and that they care about. And rightly so, you should be discerning about a guardian review. It doesn't necessarily mean it necessarily mean anything.
Kate Lovell
And one of the ways that I think will be helpful here in Hornchurch, because we have such a loyal and panto loving audience, and that is probably the closest that is easy to say it's like this.
Flo O’Mahony
yeah, and you guys have really innovated around accessing your pantomimes, right? Like you do a lot of BSL integration, and you've done loads of loads of really cool stuff.
Kate Lovell
Yeah, I've only been here a couple of years, so I can't really speak to things before me, but I, when I started, I really wanted to take on panto because of the audience, and because of who comes through the door.
Flo O’Mahony
It's a really good place to change people into people who love theatre. And therefore, if you've also got some great like social, political undertones to that, it's also a really great place to have that in a really fun and joyful and collective feeling way, like what a great place to do it.
Kate Lovell
I know that people will have an amazing time, but I must admit talking to not necessarily audiences, but just people who might be working in theatre, I feel like people don't quite believe that it's not going to be worthy in some way. Yeah, and there's a sort of taking go, well, look, it is inherently political, but just forget that, because it's bloody fun. And like I have my I've only seen it once, but I loved the snack cabaret, and I'm secretly hoping I might get to see that.
Flo O’Mahony
And, yeah, me too, I love snack cabaret. It's a song with all of Rachel's favourite snacks vying for her attention, and then she picks one, and she gets to eat the snack on stage. And it's really good.
Kate Lovell
It's just brilliant. And, like, it is a little bit like, yeah, yeah. It's directed by disabled performer. It's really important. But also…
Flo O’Mahony
I know it's really It's why I was so pleased that you asked me about Lee's practice, because it's like, if you love Whose Line Is It Anyway, come basically, we're playing games with Rachel on stage, and I think we've become a bit sensitive to theatre that we arrive at and we get told we're a bad person out we get told we've never thought about this thing before, which is crazy, because we bought a ticket, so we must have thought about it at least when we were buying the ticket. And we get told like you have to change. And really, I don't, I don't think we've done ourselves a service by making lots of disabled artists feel like that's the work they have to make, like that they have to make awareness driving pieces. And now we're in this bit where, like you say, we kind of have to change the tide on how people approach a piece like perfect show, which is absolutely Rachel could not be less interested in telling you the statistic about the disabled experience. And yet, people kind of have this idea about what disabled art is, and I think we did. We made we made some, I imagine most marginalised communities feel like this in theatre, but the early stage of a lot of disabled artists careers, we told them, you just have to make a piece about who you are and your identity and how hard it is and how awful it is. And then we start to go, oh, all disabled theatre is going to be that. And that's everyone should make their big I am piece. I have no qualms about that, like we all need to say who we are as artists. And it's a huge, sort of manifest manifesto moment where we get to make that solo show that's all about our weird intersection of our identities. But then what do you make next? What do you make after that? And how do you be supported to feel like you are more interesting than just the marginalisation you experience in the world And I hope we can get that message across for your audiences, but I think you have put your fingertips on something very sensitive in in the disabled arts space at the moment, which is that audience is a little bit afraid that they're going to get told off. Yeah, totally. And they might get told off, but it would be by Rachel telling them not clapping loud enough. I was going to say, actually, Rachel's just, we've just taken out the words. And of course, this is a relaxed performance from my announcement. Now, of course, that now, of course, that, of course, it is a relaxed performance, and we, we really mean that, but it feels a bit um. It feels like we can't really say that up top of the show, because Rachel really might just turn to the audience and say, I want to talk to boys, and then we have to manage the consent and the non-misgendering of our audience and go, is there a boy who'd like to talk to Rachel? Or like, the other day, she stopped this EastEnders scene that she has a lot of directorial input into. She said, Cut. And then she looked at the audience, and I went, did you want to talk to the audience? Rachel? She normally tells an actor, like, loud or quiet, and then she chooses, or whatever the direction is. And she turned to the audience, I said, do you want to talk to them? And I was ready to say, oh, Rachel wants you to laugh louder, or something like that, which is also not a very relaxed performance vibe, but Rachel does want the audience to interact with her work. Militantly. She turned and she went loud or naughty to the audience. And I went, I don't know Rachel loud or naughty, and she went naughty, and the audience in Manchester went feral. It was like 20 seconds of pandemonium. We had people stamping, shouting, throwing things like going absolutely mental. I had to say, like, don't do anything that will get us sued. You got 10 seconds before the scene ends, 321, and they went mad. And it was so fun to watch an audience really want to join in with Rachel's vision as well, because she's got this, like, diva energy. It's why the second time, because you spoke about this worthiness, the first time we made anything to kind of share the process, it was like a backstage documentary, and it's all of us saying, like, because we're terrified, like, we're really scared of the show before we made it, we were like, this might be terrible, you know, we might be doing a bad thing. And it was all us being like, you know, accessible tech is so important and so nice to get to know Rachel. And it's really sweet and really gentle and soft. The second video we put out when we'd already made the show when we came back the second time is a Mean Girls documentary, like trailer. It's us being like, talking about Rachel as if she's Regina George, and bigging her up as this complete, like, diva, because we were, like, people have this idea of worthiness, but there's just not what the energy that Rachel brings, like, she brings this kind of like, sasspot, it girl energy, and she acts like a celebrity the whole time. It's like, it's so fun. So yeah, we've kind of changed how we talk about the show as well.
Kate Lovell
You mentioned disabled for disabled artists, what's next? And it made me think you've worked on the show for 10 years. It's out on tour now. What is next?
Flo O’Mahony
What is next for Rachel or for Zoo Co?
Kate Lovell
I think both really like for Rachel and it is a show that could tour forever is that what Rachel wants is that what Zoo Co wants?
Flo O’Mahony
We've said that for now. The strategy is we'll tour for as long as Rachel wants to. Now it doesn't seem like Rachel's slowing down in any way. She's obsessed with doing the show. This is a really nice sporadic tour, so she gets it spread out over almost a year that we've had interest from international festival bookers. It's expensive and a hard grind to bring together, and the artists involved sacrifice a lot to book a tour like this. We've got artists who've agreed to do this sporadic tour, which means that they couldn't take a Christmas gig, and they've still prioritized the show over a Christmas gig, which is phenomenal and extraordinary, and I think speaks to the show's value artistically for them.
Kate Lovell
Now I know why Stephen Colin said he couldn't audition for me.
Flo O’Mahony
He is doing a Christmas show, but yes, you're right, people that had to say no to stuff and that that's very moving for me, that people are willing to do that with my sister and with this show in terms of Rachel, Rachel will continue to be a theatre person. I think it's probably the iterations of this show will morph and change with her. Maybe this is my lack of imagination, but right now, what I'd say is this show is the singular alchemy that came together for Rachel to be able to do the job she's doing, and that really anything else, like if we said, Okay, what's Rachel's take on Romeo and Juliet would be a downgrade of her total leadership. So of course, Rachel might evolve and change and surprise me, and I hope she does, but I imagine that we, you know, we say at the beginning of show, theatre is not Rachel's only priority. She can leave at any time she might go to go get a burger from McDonald's or whatever, because Rachel isn't looking to have a career in the arts. She has paid for her work on this, and that is a whole can of worms with benefits and, you know, all of that kind of stuff. But really the show is the project for her. And then, in terms of Zoo Co, we are underneath Perfect Show for Rachel. We are R&Ding, our new show, which I am so excited about. I can't get too much into it right now, but it is kind of a follow up response to the question of, what do you do after you've made a show, like perfect show which has this electric liveness and these buttons and this thing. So, it's kind of another button Show. It's kind of another live director on stage show. It's going to be really improv focused, but it's based on an endurance competition in the 80s in America. So, it's different, and it's a real, it's a true story, and we're collaborating with Lee again, and it's so exciting, I like, can't wait to make it. It's a slightly smaller show in that there's still six people on stage and a gigantic 30-foot structure. Hopefully, if I get my way. We're also making a studio piece that is currently working title is called slug play, and that's looking at Neurodivergent female friendship through the lens of a nature documentary maker who kind of goes into silo in her little flat in London, and kind of looking at that. And we're also R&Ding a couple of other pieces, so we are, like generative at the moment, and I think perfect show is such a teaching for us in what our process needs to be, how we want to make work, how where the balance sits between new writing and improvisational liveness on stage. We always want a bit of a balance between those things in some way, although some of our work is scripted and some of it isn't, and I just feel like we're in this really exciting bit where it we're in this post Perfect Show for Rachel chapter, because this show has been so big and such an identity factor for the company. And that was the point of the award that we got right at the beginning was to allow theatre companies to make a major step change in their practice. And it was, I mean, we'd never put this many people on stage before. We'd never received commissioning in this way, in quite this way, before. And we're touring main, main stages around the country now for, you know, weeklong or two weeklong residencies. And that feels incredible. So, we've kind of made all of the pre covid slate happen, and now we're in this new slate of ideas that is just so rich and so nourishing. And I'm so lucky to be able to work across so many ideas that reflect so much, many different parts of what I care about, politically, globally, personally, socially, artistically, most importantly, artistically. thank you.
Kate Lovell
Thank you so much for your time today, Flo Thank you for listening, and it's goodbye from us.
Flo O’Mahony
Yeah, thank you so much. Bye.
Outro
Thank you for listening. We do hope you've enjoyed this episode of Disability and… Perfect Show for Rachel is touring to Hornchurch, Sheffield, Birmingham, Oxford and Leeds in 2026 please visit the Zoo Co website at wearezooco.co.uk, for dates and times. Further episodes of Disability and… can be found on the Disability Arts Online website at disabilityarts.online.
