And I’ll Blow Your House Down. Camden People’s Theatre.

Georgie Steele’s two sons Nye and Laurie were diagnosed at an early age with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a life limiting genetic condition that causes progressive muscle weakness and wasting. Her family’s experiences of the Kafkaesque bureaucracy involved in gaining support from government and from a host other organisations that claim to help but don’t form the basis of her short show And I’ll Blow Your House Down. Steele is a charismatic storyteller and physical theatre performer with an important message to impart. Families like hers, she says, need “engineered points of light in the darkness”.

Steele recounted the Three Little Pigs fable to a group of children a few days after receiving her eldest son’s diagnosis. Since then, it is has become an allegory through which she recounts her experiences. The Big Bad Wolf here is partly her sons’ condition and partly the institutions and systems her family has to battle. One senses the act of storytelling itself, in the visage of a wigged and blue-caped teller of tales, is part of the performers’ way of coping. Somehow reality becomes more manageable when reframed and retold within the context of a fairy tale.

The challenges Steele describes are real and affecting; presumably familiar to those in her family’s situation but eye-opening to those who are not. The need to literally move house and job to find a school with a wheelchair ramp. Health and safety assessments that conclude with a kind of Catch 22 inevitability that it is too risky to even conduct an assessment. Uninformed charity workers who assume she is a paid care-worker. Probing social workers who assume mothers are inevitably the prime carers and come close to ignoring the presence of fathers. Months long waits for assistance that is required in weeks and days. Steele’s courage and stoicism shines through, as does her justifiable, patient anger.

Writer:  Georgie Steele

Director:  Greta Rilletti