PATIENTS' STORIES

George Parsons - Award Winning Actor and Playwright

'it would never have been seen, had I not had my operation'

BEING OLIVIA by George Parsons opened on the 10th March 2006 at the Warehouse Theatre, Croydon to widespread critical acclaim.

“You’ve got Parkinson’s Disease.”
I couldn’t have. I was too young. I was fairly fit. But Parkinson’s it was. And is.

I come from a non-theatrical background. My mother was a bookkeeper, my father a butcher. I left school at 16 and started work as an apprentice accountant in a Glasgow shipyard. In my spare time I began to act with an amateur group. After a year, having left the shipyard because filing invoices was doing my head in (little did I know what brain damage was to come), and having gained a place to study English at the University of Glasgow, I acted with the University drama group, became its President, and came to realise that acting could be your job.

So, on leaving University, after a couple of false starts (teaching English, University administration), on my second attempt I got into drama school (the first time I tried I was incapacitated by nerves), and became, in time, an actor. I performed up and down the country. I played in the West End and at the Old Vic. I performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, in London and on Broadway.

Parky’s was diagnosed in 1987. I struggled on for some years, but eventually had to acknowledge that standing at the microphone (I was working in radio drama at this stage) with the script shaking in my hand so that it rustled, and having to lie on the floor to Recover between scenes, were signs that I should stop.

I wrote a play, giving myself the starring role as a disabled man. I won a Sony award for my performance. It was my farewell to acting. And farewell, too, to my sense of myself. If I wasn’t an actor, what was I? Who was I? On stage, I lived. Vividly. If that was denied me, what was I to do? What, indeed, could I do with this disobedient, treacherous body? What was I to do with this half-life? Was there anything left for me in the theatre? That was my world.

I had written, and had broadcast, radio plays. I decided I would write a stage play. But I needed to learn how to write it. I enrolled in the playwriting course at Birmingham University run by David Edgar.

Thanks to David’s constant encouragement, despite worsening symptoms and bouts of exhaustion and despair (“I've no energy, I can't think, I can't do this, it's hopeless, why don't I just take the sleeping pills?”), I graduated MA with Distinction - with half a play written. Well, an entire two-act play, but the second act needed more work.

The Parky’s got worse, and no one seemed to want my play in its then form. It isn’t, by the way, about Parkinson’s Disease. It’s about finding out who you are and your place in the world. Which is what I had to discover when acting was denied me. And, yes, it’s about sex and death, those perennial subjects.

I continued to get worse. Subject to the involuntary moves that are known as dyskinesias, drinking through a straw, finding I couldn’t dress or wash without help.

Then: THE MIRACLE. Three years ago I had brain surgery. Under the NHS. First patient at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, under the skilled hands of surgeon Professor Marwan Hariz, and in the care of consultant neurologist Dr Patricia Limousin. An international team determined to make my brain behave better. People tell me I was brave. It wasn’t brave. Life was becoming insupportable. Thoughts of suicide were never far away. Choosing to have it was what Americans call a no-brainer - a phrase that resonates.

It was a long day. At 9 or so my head was clamped into a metal frame. It looked like a medieval torture device. I was taken to the basement where I had a brain scan. "Stay still" was the instruction. With Parkinson’s?
Despite the terrible banging the scanning machine made I kept dropping off to sleep and waking up with a start. “Stay still.” But the professor was able to make his measurements; to locate the tiny spot in my brain that was his target.

Then to the operating theatre. Under anaesthetic, your inhibitions go. I have a tendency (hospitals and I are no strangers) to ask if I can take the anaesthetist home. This time I behaved.

The professor drilled two holes in my skull under anaesthetic. Local anaesthetic. Yes, I was awake. The noise was tremendous, like an aeroplane inside my head. Every so often I had to wave my fingers or recite the opening lines of Auden’s ‘Night Mail’ (I don’t know why that comes to be a favourite of the professor’s) to let Professor Hariz know that he was in the right place with his electrodes - for that was what he was doing, implanting two electrodes deep in my brain. “This is the night mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order.” Perhaps it’s something to do with crossing borders, boundaries. Going deep into the brain.

I never for a moment felt fear, or any anxiety about the outcome. I trusted the professor absolutely. The day wore on, with smoke and blood. I lay there, submitting to it, interested. At 5 or so it was over. It is hard to remember what those first hours and days after the operation were like. I know I no longer fell as I crossed the ward to go to the bathroom. I don’t remember - surprisingly - having a headache. I do remember being very tired. And I remember a feeling of euphoria, as I realised that things were already better, although the professor hadn’t finished his work. The electrodes were not being stimulated, but just their presence in the brain effects improvement; perhaps the brain is shocked into behaving better.

Three days later a battery pack to provide the stimulation of the electrodes was implanted under my collarbone and joined up to the electrodes with wires under the neck and scalp. General anaesthetic this time; I still didn’t ask to take the anaesthetist home.

And, oh! the difference.
It is not a cure, but my Parky’s is under control in a quite remarkable way.

However, I have been left with speech difficulties. My voice control varies. I find it hard to articulate. My breath gets trapped. It can be hard to understand me - not all the time, but enough of the time to make me fretful. I was an actor. I earned my living with my voice. It is enormously frustrating. I find I tend to use gesture instead of words. My speech therapist does not approve.

I have lost my voice, so I have to write to be heard. And I have returned to that play about identity, who one is and one’s place in the world.

The op. has meant that I have had the energy and application to finish the second act, and to find a theatre that is excited by my play and wants to put it on.

BEING OLIVIA by George Parsons is at the Warehouse Theatre, Croydon, from 10 March to 2 April 2006

Box Office: 020 8680 4060.
Web site: www.warehousetheatre.co.uk >>

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