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One of the Greatest Jokers: Terry O’ Leary.

RIP 13th January 1960 – 31 July 2024

Adrian Jackson

9/16/2024

As part of our ongoing desire to identify the skills and attributes which make a great joker, I want to pay tribute to the great Terry O’Leary, our key joker at Cardboard Citizens for many years, who sadly died a few weeks ago. Her funeral was an event filled with laughter and tears and gave a sense of how many people’s lives she had affected, as a Joker, teacher and director.

For the purposes of this blog, I have been thinking about what particular qualities Terry had which made her so special and so powerful as a Joker, and what tricks she invented to make the role work for her. A few thoughts.

Neutral yet playful

Terry had a playful persona, in life and on stage, with a mischievous sidelong smile which both invited participation and gently questioned the efficacy of interventions. She was a very effective embodiment of our Cardboard Citizens tradition of the (apparently) neutral joker – this neutrality was always critical for us, as our very mixed hostel and theatre audiences were rarely already of one mind, or a choir to be preached at.

There are TO events at which although we (the audience, the spect-actors) may have a fruitful debate about the best course of action, we are already mostly in agreement about desired outcomes before we even start. These can be wonderful life, and solidarity-affirming events and I am by no means undervaluing them when I say that my favourite audiences include people of radically differing opinions. In the hostels and prisons where we performed through most of our early days, our audiences included people of all sides of the political spectrum, and Terry’s inquisitive stance played well in these circumstances.

Gender and ambiguity

There are obviously subjects and situations in which the gender of the joker feels relevant, and the deployment of the ‘wrong’ gender for the particular moment might put some potential spectactors off participation. As an obvious example, women with bad experiences of men are less likely to be drawn on stage by a very masculine-presenting joker, and the same applies (maybe to a lesser extent) with a feminine-presenting Joker addressing men who feel they have been badly treated by women . As a small woman of slight but sturdy build, who favoured trousers and T-shirts or jackets, Terry came across as a figure of ambiguous gender, and I do think this helped her generate many important conversations. Though her birth name was Theresa, she took exception to being written as a fragile-sounding ‘Teri’ preferring the run-of-the-mill working-class-ness maleness of ‘Terry’. And though she was an out and proud lesbian, this too was never something she proclaimed in her joker role unless it was relevant to the subject under discussion; my colleague Lil wonders if her experience of the world in regard to her gender expression made her able to relate or empathise more widely. Whatever the reasons, she was a joker for all seasons.

Small audiences

Terry was especially good with small audiences in difficult spaces. There is nothing worse than our audiences feeling a sense of obligation to participate or speak, that we (as Joker) need to be saved from the embarrassment of the game not working by their participation. With a small group, Terry was very good at lowering the stakes of participation, with far less of the ’Come on down and show us!’ quality of larger staged Forum pieces - rather more the sense of a quieter shared therapeutic process, that we are just a group of people in a room having a good chat about something important. Terry could sit with a cast of 4 and an audience of 6 spectactors in the lounge of a hostel and make this quiet magic happen.

Joker tricks

One last thing. While sorting through photos to use at the event, we found a picture of Terry jokering with a puppet rat on her arm.

My memory is that this picture is from a show called Three Blind Mice, written by Bola Agbaje. Terry introduced the show in the guise of a mouse herself, wearing a long tail under a rather formal tailcoat. She looked very dapper (more dapper than this picture suggests). And the puppet rat on her arm would occasionally whisper things to Terry – Tony McBride, another old jokering hand at Cardboard Citizens, described it as a form of meta-jokering, meaning that by this means Terry could take suggestions or criticisms from the mouse which hadn’t necessarily arisen in the audience, without losing her own neutrality. This was a neat trick, a little like what auctioneers call taking an (imaginary) bid ‘ogg the wall’ – a tricksy way of getting the proceedings going when people are a little too quiet.

Had we not lost Terry, we would definitely have had her lead a masterclass for STOP. I shall miss her. We will be commemorating her life in an event later this year, which we shall certainly mention here.