Actor with terminal illness wins prestigious award

An actor from Belfast with a terminal illness has won one of the UK's biggest drama awards.

Michael Campbell, also known as Michael Patrick, won the Judges' award at the prestigious The Stage Awards, which celebrate theatre across the UK, at London's Royal Opera House on Monday.

Mr Patrick, who has motor neurone disease (MND), won for creating and starring in an adaptation of The Tragedy of Richard III at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast.

The 34-year-old, who was diagnosed with MND in 2023, has previously performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company and written radio and TV drama for the BBC.

MND is condition that affects the nerves found in the brain and spinal cord, which tell your muscles what to do.

It causes weakness that gets worse over time and can significantly shorten life expectancy.

International rugby players Rob Burrow and Doddie Weir raised awareness of the terminal neurological illness before they died.

Speaking to BBC News NI, Mr Patrick said that he and his writing partner Oisín Kearney had adapted Shakespeare's play with his own illness in mind.

"In Shakespeare's version Richard III is deformed from birth," he said.

"They found his skeleton in a car park and it looked like he had scoliosis."

"We changed it so that at the start of the play Richard gets news that that he's got a terminal illness, something like MND that's going to get worse," he said.

"We used that to talk and think about why he would do what he does.

"He does horrible things in the play but he does it to become king.

"Now I didn't try and murder anyone when I got my news but I did try to play Richard III."

Mr Patrick said his MND had started in his legs, and he now uses a wheelchair.

"It has gotten quite bad, I can't brace my legs, I can't move them at all now," he said.

"And it is slowly getting into my lungs, I think - it's hard to know but I am finding it more difficult to breathe now."

Mr Patrick is on an experimental drug trial run from Dublin, and is hoping that will provide some help.

He is still writing drama, including a sitcom about a man in his 30s who gets MND.

"People like it whenever you write stuff that is true to life," he said.

"There's an authenticity there that people can latch on to."

Writing about his own condition "can be hard", he said, but added that "it can be good at the same time," he said.

"It's kind of cathartic, you know," he said.

"You really have to tap in to what you're feeling and what you're going through, which is difficult, but at the same time it allows you to find the funny side of things.

"It does help with my own head writing about it."

Mr Patrick said that adapting the play and performing in it with MND did bring challenges.

"We got sponsorship from John Preston Mobility Care out in Lisburn and they gave us lots of different wheelchairs," he said.

"So it started, I was in a manual wheelchair and then I went into an electric one and then there was like a standing wheelchair.

"The difficulties were me transferring between the wheelchairs and the Lyric were brilliant at that.

"They got someone in to help me with that and really made it easy for a disabled actor to work on stage.

"We also had him using oxygen towards the second half of the play because he couldn't breathe very well."

Rather than being killed in battle, the Lyric adaption portrays Richard succumbing to MND.

Mr Patrick said that the reception and standing ovation he got at the Stage Awards in London was "emotional".

"It was crazy," he said.

"It was really, really nice to see the support of people in the room."

He also paid tribute to his childhood drama teacher in east Belfast.

"I said in my speech that I wanted to dedicate the award to my old drama teacher Gwyneth Murdock, who passed away just before the show opened," he said.

"She didn't get a chance to see it but she was unbelievable, she had me speaking Shakespeare when I was four years old!

"A lot of people owe their theatre careers to Gwyneth."