‘Mend your speech’: Elizabeth Inchbald, Dysfluency, and the Remaking of Theatre History

Bennett-Muir Fellowship Residency

Dr. Samuel Yates, Assistant Professor of Theatre and Resident Dramaturg at Pennsylvania State University, is a deaf artist-scholar whose work explores disability aesthetics and labour in performance. Their forthcoming book, Cripping Broadway: Producing Disability in the American Musical, examines how disability operates as both a narrative and aesthetic force in commercial theatre. Yates will be investigating the interplay between American and British stage traditions, focusing on historical portrayals of disability in musicals and operettas. Drawing on materials from the V&A’s Theatre and Performance Collections and the Bunnett-Muir Musical Theatre Archive, they look forward to studying a range of historical and contemporary productions, from The Beauty Stone (1897) to The Little Big Things (2023). Their research traces disability’s representation as moral metaphor, spectacle, and social critique and at the V&A will encompass the musical Barnum (1980) and its depiction of ‘the oldest woman alive’ Joyce Heth and ‘small man in the world’ Tom Thumb.