Unspeakable Conversations review – Liz Carr and Mat Fraser’s straight talk is enthralling

Unspeakable Conversations review – Liz Carr and Mat Fraser’s straight talk is enthralling

Mick Lally theatre, Galway
Playing a disability rights lawyer and the philosopher Peter Singer, as well as themselves, the actors deliver a powerful production

A remarkable real-life encounter between an American disability rights activist and a professor of bioethics at Princeton University is the spark for Christian O’Reilly’s new play for Once Off Productions, written in collaboration with Liz Carr, Mat Fraser and Olwen Fouéré.

After disabled lawyer Harriet McBryde Johnson (Carr) heard the Australian philosopher Peter Singer (Fraser) lecture in her home town of Charleston, South Carolina, in 2001, their email exchanges led to an invitation to address his students at Princeton. Accepting the challenge to respond to Singer’s advocacy of selective euthanasia of disabled babies and assisted suicide of disabled adults, it was as if she was being asked to justify her own existence, Johnson wrote in an influential New York Times Magazine article.

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