The Silent Twins
Starring Shirley Parker, Sharon Parker, Ena Cabayo, Marcus D’Amico, J. O. Roberts and Tony Robinson
Written by Marjorie Wallace
Directed by Jon Amiel
Year: 1986
Country: UK
Running Time: 90 Minutes
The second night of London’s 8th International Disability Film Festival saw the first screening in over 20 years of The Silent Twins, a controversial docudrama that aired on the BBC in 1986 but has been out of the reach of public consumption ever since. The film is inspired by the lives of June and Jennifer Gibbons (played here by Shirley and Sharon Parker), a pair of identical twins who refused to speak to virtually anyone other than themselves and by the time they were 19, were committed to Broadmoor – a high security psychiatric hospital in Berkshire – for arson.
To say that June and Jennifer were reticent would be a gross understatement. In public, the two appear unable to respond vocally or even make eye contact when addressed. In voiceover, the twins’ describe it as an inability to interact with the world around them and that they can only feed off each other when they are in private. It’s quite a long time into the film before we actually see them converse together and it’s quite surprising when they do. But all is not well when they are on their own either. They suffer from a simultaneous co-dependence and inability to live together that baffled therapists and would eventually be diagnosed as schizophrenia.
In private, the two are wildly creative and continually write short stories and chronicle their thoughts in their journals. In their writing, they express a desire to become famous and when their writing doesn’t attract attention quickly enough they start looking outside their house for another outlet for their pent-up energy.
They soon become attracted to an aimless bad boy named Wayne (Marcus D’Amico) who teaches them how to drink, do drugs and chew gum obnoxiously. After they pass that stage, they start setting a string of fires in their Wales countryside town of Haverfordwest. When the police would come to investigate, June and Jennifer would hang around suspiciously but were largely ignored by the authorities. They describe their motivation in voiceover as “We longed for the world to take notice of us but the world wouldn’t take us seriously.” This is a mindset that occupies much of the second half of the film, as if to say, people with disabilities can be delinquents too, not just the saints they are often portrayed to be in film.
Directed by Jon Amiel (The Singing Detective, Copycat), The Silent Twins has aged well, its controversial nature still retaining its potency due in large to a scene of sexual experimentation inside a Church. The other conduit of controversy is the film’s decision to not pass judgment one way or another on the lead characters. Through refusing to vilify their actions, it becomes complicit with their behavior by helping achieve their desire to become famous through their acts of destruction.
The screening was followed by a Q&A with Marjorie Wallace, who wrote the screenplay and the book from which the film is based. She discusses in length the brilliance of June and Jennifer’s writing, describing their prose as containing Brontë like imagery and very funny and insightful descriptions of the people they encountered. None of this is captured in the film’s monotonous voiceovers or in the way the characters are portrayed. The film is well executed and contains powerful subject matter but one gets the impression it would be necessary to read Wallace’s book to fully grasp the nature of their remarkable personalities.
