“Special school” satire set to open at Arts House

A fierce, funny work lifting the lid on “special education” will play at Arts House in North Melbourne, which has commissioned the piece, over six nights in March.

On the eve of the premiere of her play about the horrors of “special education” Kath Duncan confesses it feels “a bit like revenge”.

The show, Specials, is based on the 64-year-old’s lived experience of the “special ed” system in NSW in the 1960s supplemented by research and a licence to “invent freely”.

Its heinous villain, for instance, is modelled on her former headmistress, who “was just hideous, everyone was scared of her”.

Even so her qualities have been heightened for comic effect.

What the playwright is enjoying most at the moment, though, is the young disabled cast’s connection with her script.

“There's this beautiful understanding that even though those guys didn't go through the same thing, we all know where it comes from,” Duncan says.

The play is also about advocacy, although the label doesn’t sit well with its flamboyant creator.

“I'm an artist foremost but I'm fascinated by impairment and discrimination and the sort of worlds that we have to exist in to survive as disabled folk,” she says.

For more than half of her first decade of life, that world was special schools in outer western Sydney, one of them literally built on a former garbage dump, where she was subject to confinement, objectification, paternalistic control and low expectations.

Writer Kath Duncan and director Tansy Gorman. Photo: Hanna Komissarova.


She would be timed to put on and take off the prosthetic limbs she used to wear, Duncan says, was “X-rayed 'til [she] glowed in the dark” and was earmarked for progression to a sheltered workshop.

She still remembers the surprising “movement and colour and light” of seeing kids during recess at “normal school” when she joined her siblings there at the age of nine.

Movement at the special school had been “effectively kind of banned,” she says.

As an adult Duncan felt she had left it long behind, having had her world changed by meeting her “first cool disabled person” at age 25.

“I got to see everything very, very differently and ended up reading disability theory,” she says.

She went on to work as a journalist, writer, performer and arts access officer among other things.

The genesis of Specials, though, was the rage she started to feel, in her forties, about her old special school.

It led her into three years of PhD research on segregated schools, and her own school in particular, that involved interviews with former students, teachers and family members.

The most confronting material was actually the official Department of Education records, Duncan says.

For one thing, they revealed that a doctor had been testing drugs on students with muscular dystrophy at her school in the 1960s.

In fact, Duncan believes that similar practices to those she experienced are still going on in special education, although they “target” kids with intellectual, behavioural or psychiatric issues or who are “severely physically incapacitated”.

“The same practices are still going on because there isn't a lot of governance or oversight,” she claims.

Over time Duncan’s PhD project morphed into a dramatic piece.

Following the 2023 report of the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, which challenged the continued existence of “special ed”, it became a hot topic for the first time ever, Duncan says, and her play won development funding.

Cut to March 2026 and eight performers are rehearsing a visually arresting and darkly comic scene upstairs at the North Melbourne Town Hall, in the leadup to a week-long season of the play commissioned by Arts House as part of its Warehouse Residency program.

In the scene, former special school friends Simon and Cheryl meet by chance while waiting to give evidence at the royal commission as, meanwhile, royal commissioners modelled on the witches from Macbeth, recite their invocations.

Despite the gravity of its subject matter, Specials “reaches great heights of comedy and silliness,” according to director Tansy Gorman, who has been working with Duncan on the show’s development over several years.

“One thing this community is pretty good at is gallows humour, and laughing at the absurdity,” Gorman says.

But in addition to a dose of silliness, the director would like the audience to go away from the play with an understanding of the “depth of horror, absurdity and resilience” revealed by the royal commission.

And also an awareness that “people have the ability to do amazing things if we work within a strengths-based model as opposed to a deficit-based one”.

Specials opens at Arts House on Tuesday, March 24 and runs until Sunday, March 29. •