What’s Done Cannot be Undone by Athena Stevens: I never want to know the name of the
What’s Done Cannot be Undone by Athena Stevens (HQ £18.99, 400pp)
What’s Done Cannot Be Undone by Athena Stevens is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Athena Stevens doesn’t know the name of the doctor whose arrogance gave her cerebral palsy.
She prefers not to. ‘Forgiveness, I think, is easier when you don’t know someone’s name.’ Not that she has forgiven him. His actions bequeathed her with a lifetime of wheelchair-bound disability.
‘Toxic optimism’ is how Stevens describes his reassurances to her pregnant mother when the baby was facing the wrong way in the womb. ‘It’ll be fine! She’ll probably straighten herself out in a few weeks!’
But she didn’t. For four catastrophic minutes during her birth in a Chicago hospital, Athena was starved of oxygen. As a result, she writes, ‘my body hurries itself between being so low in muscle tension that it could melt into a puddle on the floor, and then jerking upright with a full-body spasm’.
Stevens has ‘disarticulate speech’. Her limbs and fingers are so hard to control that she types at just six words per minute. But this highly intelligent woman’s eloquence comes across powerfully when those words hit the page. Her visceral memoir is a searing outpouring of 40 years of struggles, injustices, and victories.
Stevens has become a successful playwright and actress. Her 2016 play Schism (about a disabled student in love with a failed architect) was acclaimed by critics, and she was nominated for an Olivier Award.
Her ambition was scotched from the start. Her mother drove Athena around theatres but each one said they couldn’t see how having her ‘would work’.
She and her parents had to fight for everything. Financial compensation came – but, as the Shakespeare quote in the book’s title hammers home, what was done could not be undone. Her mother broke the news while tucking her up in bed one night: ‘You’ll never not have cerebral palsy, darling. It will always be part of your life.’
Awarded: Athena Stevens poses on the red carpet upon arrival to attend The 2019 Olivier Awards
She eventually went to one of the best schools in America, Stevenson High School, with a full-time aide, and then on to Davidson liberal arts college.
One summer, the Royal Shakespeare Company visited. Stevens got on well with them and went on to do a summer course at RADA in London.
A leading lady from the company, hearing her do a Julius Caesar monologue, said: ‘This is going to be a long, uphill battle, but you have to do it. You have to pursue acting. It’s going to take your fire to blaze a trail.’
Reading this memoir you learn how litigious Athena can be. Most recently, she sued the Globe Theatre, where she was working as an Associate Artist. An actor friend had foolishly showed her some photos of his girlfriend topless. ‘In the UK,’ she explains, ‘eliciting any sort of unwanted sexual activity, including showing people images that they did not consent to see, is legally sexual abuse when it is done to a “vulnerable adult”.’
When she heard that the Globe was about to hire him, she raised safeguarding concerns. They went ahead anyway, and put the project she was involved in on hold. So she sued them – for safeguarding issues, discrimination, harassment and victimisation. They reached a settlement in March this year.
Throughout this impassioned narrative, Stevens returns to those fateful four minutes. ‘The Very Bad Thing done to me on the Very First Day is something I cannot fix. And the weight of bearing it should not be mine.’