Everybody loves Robert Softley Gale. He may not be a household name, but in the world of Scottish theatre, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who hasn’t a good word to say about him. That includes the good folk at Creative Scotland; he’s one of 20 artists selected by them to create new work as part of the Cultural Programme around this year’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
“I’m still at the early stages of developing that,” Robert explains when The Scots Magazine speaks to him in early March, “but that hopefully will feature myself and a disabled athlete from a Commonwealth country. Like my previous show, If These Spasms Could Speak, it’ll be looking at the body. My core idea is investigating how my body made me become an artist, and how their body made them become an athlete – both the similarities and the differences between us.”
If Robert’s focus on his body seems rather self-centred, he has good reason to; he’s had a lifetime to become accustomed to strangers first and foremost viewing him as disabled, seeing only his wheelchair and physical impairments. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, much of his work has aimed to highlight the human being “behind” the disability, whether we’re talking about the controversial Girl X, which he performed for the National Theatre of Scotland, or most recently the brand new Scottish sex comedy Wendy Hoose, his first work as co-artistic director of inclusive Glasgow-based Birds of Paradise Theatre Company.
Yet a life in the theatre is not entirely unexpected. “My mum and sister were both very much into Amateur Dramatics, so from about the age of about five – growing up in Kirkintilloch, north of Glasgow – I was around amateur theatre,” he explains. “I would be at the side of the stage, because there was no where else for me to go.” Yet there didn’t seem to be any obvious place for him on the stage. “They were doing things like Agatha Christie – your very standard AmDram productions – and there were not the parts for a young disabled guy. So it was never really entertained that I would ever be on stage.”
In hindsight, though, even that experience would prove invaluable. “As I got older I did a lot of back stage work, working in props, lighting design, and getting interested in the technology part of it,” he says. “All good experience because now, when I’m directing a production, I can see it from different angles. But it wasn’t until I was at Glasgow University, and when I started doing Theatre Studies, that I got a chance to do a little bit of performance.”
Robert’s the first to accept that his university career might initially appear somewhat ‘circuitous’. “I went round every subject in the whole Uni!” he laughs. “I started doing computer science; I got a bit geeky, but then realised that nobody else in that field could hold a conversation! I didn’t fit in. So I went into a more management-business field, and also started philosophy for a couple of years.” If all that suggests a lack of direction to you, it has actually proved remarkably useful since–not least when he set up his own business advising arts organisations on accessibility issues. “Also, when you’re looking at characters on the stage, there’s a lot of crossover with philosophy,” he adds. “And theatre nowadays involves a lot of technology, so it’s handy to speak the language. I can ‘speak the geek’ and tell them what we need.”
Nevertheless, as a wheelchair user, crossing from the wings to centre stage proved far more challenging than the physical distance might suggest. “Even at Uni, Theatre Studies was all quite academic,” he says. “It wasn’t until my third year that I was approached by Theatre Workshop in Edinburgh, who asked if I would consider auditioning for a place in the new resident, multi-ability company they were forming at that time. I’d never really performed much, so I went thinking it was never going to happen. I got the job, and all my plans to go into either a managerial or technology role went out the window!”
His time with Theatre Workshop proved an invaluable foundation for his subsequent career not just as a solo performer, writer and director, but also as an advocate for disabled people’s accessibility to the arts as both audience members and professional practitioners. Yet it also had a more personal consequence. In 2005, the night before the G8 protests at Gleneagles, Theatre Workshop presented a community production of a play which Robert had partly written a couple of years before. The part he’d written and originally performed was played that night by Nathan Gale; the pair met and travelled up together to the protest the following day. They’ve been a couple now for nearly 10 years.
Indeed, it’s fair to say that, given the realities of television audiences, far more people have seen snatches of Robert talking about equality rights in the last couple of years than during his entire theatre career. “Nathan works for the Equality Network and was very much involved with the recent Equal Marriage campaign; in fact he wrote bits of the legislation which eventually became law,” Robert says. “So whenever the press would call up wanting a couple to interview, it was easier for him to call me up – and the Equality Network knew that we were both quite articulate, that we wouldn’t say anything too stupid.”
His involvement in the campaign was not without its good points, however. “I think it’s been quite good, as a disabled guy, to be in the news for something other than being disabled!” Robert points out. “It’s a way of getting the message across that we’ve got other parts to our lives – that we’re not just the disabled person or the gay person. I quite like that we’ve done that in quite a subtle way,” he adds, before laughing. “Well, as subtle as I ever get!”
First published by The Scots Magazine, June 2014.
