It’s 13 years since Christian O’Reilly’s play Sanctuary broke new ground for its portrayal of Sophie and Larry, two people with intellectual disabilities and the unfair restrictions they faced when it came to dating. His new drama, Finding Sophie which opens this week, revisits their lives. Christian tells JUDY MURPHY about the importance of  telling their story.

“We can underestimate people with an intellectual disability,” says Christian O’Reilly. And he should know.

His play Sanctuary, commissioned in 2012 by Blue Teapot Theatre, a company comprised of actors with intellectual disability (ID), demonstrates that people with ID have the same feelings and emotions as non-ID people, but often suffer the frustration of not having these feelings acknowledged.

“The audience reaction was so warm and engaging,” says Christian, who credits the cast and Blue Teapot Artistic Director Petal Pilley for the quality of that production – Sanctuary was later made into an award-winning film.

Sanctuary proved that, contrary to some people’s belief, a drama set in the world of intellectual disability, performed by intellectually disabled artists doesn’t have to be “worthy and boring”.

Done properly, such work is “touching, funny and good”, says Christian.

“There is much more emotional intelligence at play than we often recognise,” he adds of people with ID.

When their stories are presented on stage, audiences can see people who “are human; emotional, flawed, cranky, funny, just like we are”.

Theatre is powerful in helping to forge those connections, he observes.

“An audience has the opportunity to be transformed by what they see. Not always and not for everyone, but it is possible,” he says, recalling how, after Sanctuary, audience members remarked to him, ‘we are more alike than I realised’.

For someone who fell into working in the world of disability by accident, Christian has done amazing work to increase the visibility of people who, too often, are not seen.

His stage version of the book No Magic Pill, about disability rights campaigner Martin Naughton, from An Spidéal, which was presented in 2022, directed by Raymond Keane, again presented a holistic picture of people who were kept out of sight, denied opportunities to reach their potential.

Christian knew Martin, having worked with the campaigning organisation the older man founded. The aspiring writer joined the Independent Living Group in the 1990s after graduating from DCU, when he needed a job.

“I fell into it,” he says with a laugh.

If he did, Christian cared. His commitment and humanity is why Blue Teapot’s Petal Pilley asked him to write a play 13 years ago.

“I’d applied for another film commission the previous year, which I didn’t get, but she must have seen something in me,” he says.

“Petal said Blue Teapot wanted a play to represent the members’ frustration at not having the right to have an opportunity to have a relationship or sex.”

That was because they were legally prohibited from sexual relationships outside marriage, a paternalistic approach that sometimes led to families and carers infantilising people with ID.

The result was Sanctuary, with its central characters of Liam and Sophie, played by Kieran Coppinger and Charlene Kelly.

Now, he has written a sequel, Finding Sophie, which will be staged at the Town Hall Theatre from this weekend.

Charlene and Kieran will reprise their original roles and will be joined by fellow actors Anna Healy and Denis Conway, whom many people will know from their work with Druid Theatre.

Finding Sophie, commissioned by the Town Hall Theatre, is a Decadent Theatre production and directed by that company’s Artistic Director, Andrew Flynn.

Christian laughs and says, back in 2020, when Town Hall manager Fergal McGrath commissioned him to write a play set in the world of intellectual disability, he wasn’t thinking of a sequel.

Pictured: The cast of Finding Sophie: Anna Healy and Denis Conway join Charlene Kelly and Kieran Coppinger, who are reprising the roles of Sophie and Larry, which they played in Sanctuary back in 2012. PHOTO: JOE O’SHAUGHNESSY.