Laughing Boy: the shocking true story of a teenager’s preventable death in NHS care
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The “laughing boy” in writer and director Stephen Unwin’s sobering new play is the real-life Connor Sparrowhawk, an autistic teenager with learning difficulties from Oxford who drowned in a bath aged 18, unnoticed behind a locked door, during an epileptic seizure at an Assessment and Treatment Unit (ATU) run by an NHS trust called Southern Health.
This adaptation of Justice for Laughing Boy, a book written by Connor’s mother, Sara Ryan – who is also an academic specialising in learning disabilities and autism – deftly unpacks the timeline of the tragedy of Connor’s very preventable death and its resultant campaign for justice. Even as it dramatises its bleak premise of incalculable loss following institutional failings, it reveals a moving story about love, laughter and the indomitability of one family’s fighting spirit.
We are tipped straight into the action when Alfie Friedman as Connor, on stage throughout, tells us: “I died this morning.” From there, pertinent details are swiftly and efficiently sketched in: the phone call his mother received on July 4 2013 alerting her to the fact that her son had been taken to hospital after he was found unconscious in the bath; facing off with the buck-passing obstructionism of Southern Health who tried to discredit Ryan at the inquest and never apologised for the manner of Connor’s death; the squalor and neglect that characterised the ATU; the campaign for justice that eventually resulted in Southern Health being fined £2 million, and probing questions from reporters that Unwin cleverly transforms into theatrical devices to trigger reflections on Connor’s personality and the impact his death had on his family.
What emerges is a portrait of a witty young man with a highly developed sense of justice, who liked crispy duck and David Bowie, whose infectious mirth earned him the nickname “laughing boy” and who really, really loved London buses. The spontaneous ‘awww’ from the audience when a patchwork quilt featuring London buses made by supporters of the campaign was projected on to the back wall illustrated the point of the play perfectly: it humanises Connor, counteracting the heartless way in which Southern Health described his passing as the “unexpected death of a service user.”
The seven actors take to their task with zeal and skill, cycling between many characters in agile choreography on a spare stage that contains only four chairs. Janie Dee is particularly impressive portraying Sara Ryan’s disbelief, guilt, shame, rage and determination as a mother trying to do the best by her son. Her family’s disorientation in the immediate aftermath of Connor’s death and subsequent events is niftily conveyed by the blurred images of normal street life in video designer Matt Powell’s images projected on to the back wall which at the end of the play, also features the faces of other vulnerable people who died in similar circumstances. I defy you not to think of London buses in a new way after seeing this production at the Off West End Jermyn Street Theatre, a small venue that is punching well above its weight in its recent delivery of powerful dramas.
Until May 31; jermynstreettheatre.co.uk
