BACK to Back Theatre is remarkable by any estimate.

Not only did the small, Geelong-based company win the 2022 International Ibsen Award – the top theatre prize in the world and worth more than $A385,000 – but its film version of its play coming to Canberra just won the audience award at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.

Back to Back comes from a regional city, not one of our big theatrical metropoli, and it’s made it to the top with a sophisticated, argumentative team of actors who can hold their own anywhere in the world. 

All of them – and this is the company’s raison d’etre – are neuro-diverse or live with some form of intellectual disability. 

I caught up with the play’s director, Bruce Gladwin, who’s been with the company for 23 years, as he prepared to bring “The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes”, to The Playhouse in its first tour to the national capital. 

Yes, he agrees, it has a long title, but it has a long pedigree, coming from a story used in Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” where the hunter, a horse, lets go of his prey in pursuit of something else but finds that in doing so, he becomes the prey. The meaning will become clear. 

The theatrical set up is simple. A group of activists with disabilities gather in a town hall for a very angry meeting. It’s in real-time, about an hour, and the play never leaves the confines of the hall, as the actors address the audience.

It has the look and feel of a meeting – chairs arranged on stage, with a large upstage screen on which the actors’ thoughts begin to appear, but the screen takes on a life of its own, becoming a kind of antagonist.

The activists, played by Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring and Scott Price, engage with audiences on the subject of artificial intelligence and, as the play proceeds, a dystopian future presents itself in which human beings, faced in the future with superior intelligences, may face the very same treatment as people with disability do now, just like the horse who becomes the prey. 

“The play shifts the perspective, asking the audience to consider their own expectations of people with disabilities,” Gladwin says.

But good theatre is always to do with actors on stage, he says, and the skills of the three actors are revealed as they unveil the sense of “otherness” that is so often projected upon them. By turning patronising attitudes back on the audience, they’re effectively saying: “This is not about us so much; it’s about you, in the future”.

The activist characters are street-smart, intelligent and acquainted with the Disability Royal Commission, but all of them represent some form of lived experience, have been subject to abuse, discrimination and malpractice, about which they talk frankly to the audience. 

“But this isn’t a confessional piece of theatre,” Gladwin is quick to stress, “it’s more real and it’s incredibly entertaining.”

Besides, Laherty, Mainwaring and Price actors have encountered every kind of condescension imaginable and the play tackles that head-on.

With a decade of international touring behind them, they’re well-acquainted with different terminology for people with disabilities, with some European countries still using the word “handicapped” but that doesn’t faze them and, in fact, they enjoy the cut and thrust of debate. 

Gladwin is naturally delighted that the talents of the stars, who co-wrote “The Shadow” with him over a three-year period, have been recognised in an internationally competitive environment

“Even though we’re talking about disability, there are universal elements in our play about the machinations of power – the subject of all great theatre,” he says. “Our object is to make great art.”

“The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes”, The Playhouse, May 11-13. Book at canberratheatrecentre.com.au

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