HEALTH NEWS - snowboarding accident to be re-enacted in play called "Tom"

Published: 22 July, 2010
by JOSH LOEB

Days when hope is scarce,
melancholy overwhelms,
the energy to struggle is gone,
and resignation resumes.
Love is the only keeper,
it calls you back,
for the remains of the day,
like a candle in the dark. 

THESE lines from a poem by Tom Nabarro, a young man paralysed from the shoulders down after a snowboarding accident, sum up the powerful message of Tom’s, a new play that will be performed next month at the Camden People’s Theatre.

Tom, 25, and his girlfriend Ellen Stewart helped devise the production, which will get its premiere at the Hampstead Road venue as part of the Camden Fringe festival.

Using puppets and actors, it tells the story of Tom and Ellen’s relationship before and after the accident, which took place in Bulgaria in 2007.

Tom sustained injuries including an broken back, punctured lungs and broken ribs.

After three cardiac arrests while receiving treatment at the Military Medical Centre in Sofia and a further 15 months spent in hospital in the UK, Tom returned to his home near Oxford.

Now in a wheelchair, he continues to work in his IT job and travels regularly. He has visited the mountains in Switzerland and Sweden and a music festival in France and has met Professor Stephen Hawking.

“Tom has overcome so many obstacles and has come so very close to returning to the life he was leading before his accident,” says writer and director Toby Clarke, who co-founded Sketty Productions, the acclaimed company behind for the play.

“He’s very thankful he’s alive, very thankful that he has his friends and family and Ellen around him and that he can still do a lot of the things he was doing before. 

“What intrigued me most was his relationship with Ellen. There are plenty of relationships where it doesn’t work out for one reason or another and those are perhaps trivial reasons – and then you have Tom and Ellen, who are not only surviving in a relationship but are thriving and have enormous passion and love for each other.”

Toby’s previous plays have included Feral, about a young man’s isolation through Asperger’s syndrome.

A graduate of the Central School of Speech and Drama in Swiss Cottage, he became friends with Tom while helping to produce the Channel 4 show Young, Autistic & Stagestruck with Ellen.

“Tom and Ellen have been very open to us doing the show,” he says.

“I’d never written from life before, but they were generous and honest.

Their relationship often has very little to do with the situation Tom finds himself in.

He was an inspiring individual before the accident and he’s an inspiring individual now.

So although the play does centre around paralysis, it focuses on Tom as an individual.

“What fascinates me is human nature and how we are designed to overcome serious obstacles.

I wanted to write a love story without going in a cheesy Hollywood direction.

I’m not really interested in love stories per se but this one has captured my imagination.”

Sketty Productions has received support from the Soho Writers’ Centre in Dean Street and National Theatre Studio.

• Tom’s is at the Camden People’s Theatre, 58-60 Hampstead Road, NW1 from August 4-8, 7.45pm.
For ­tickets (£7.50) call 08444 77 1000.