Theatre review: Deaf Republic

Deaf Republic takes its cue from poetry, in a variety of forms: The source material is Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky's book of the same name, while the play itself is co-written by its directors Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, aka Dead Centre, and BSL poet Zoë McWhinney. In a fictional Eastern European town occupied by enemy soldiers, a child is watching a puppet show when a soldier commands the crowd to disperse. But the child is Deaf and when he fails to obey the order he's shot dead. The next morning the entire town has also become profoundly Deaf in protest, communicating in their own mix of British and Ukrainian sign language designed in part to add an extra level of inscrutability for their enemies. The soldiers brutally try to break the protest and prove the people are only pretending, but meet with a wall of silence.

The play opens showcasing its playful side: Romel Belcher introduces it with a speech in BSL, which Caoimhe Coburn Gray translates into English for the benefit of the hearing audience; there's a lot of tongue-in-cheek references to accessibility, as in a Deaf Republic concessions have to be made so the hearing aren't left out.

The captions that provide a third method of communicating with the audience don't make the whole thing feel any less Brechtian, and this metatheatrical feel remains a major part of the show: Eoin Gleeson is a townsperson who hasn't quite worked out if they're all really meant to have gone Deaf or faking it, and is gently reassured that isn't really the point and he'll get there in the end.

Things get a lot darker though. Belcher and Coburn Gray take on the roles of couple Alfonso and Sonya, who run the puppet theatre, but the play's as brutal with dispensing of its apparent leads as it is with portraying sudden violence, and by the end the theatre is run by Galya (Derbhle Crotty.) It has the appearance of having turned into a brothel, but the women (Kate Finegan and Lisa Kelly) are there to kill off the soldiers (all played by Dylan Tonge Jones, because the invaders all "look the same" to the locals) one by one.

The show opens with a mostly bare stage but Jeremy Herbert's set, Mae Leahy's costumes and Grant Gee's video soon turn this into an evening of striking, hypnotic visuals fitting of a show about a visual language. For the hearing audience there's also Kevin Gleeson's sound design adding to the eerie atmosphere, and at some point it seemed to me to have fully turned into a surreal nightmare framed by the puppet theatre's blood-red curtains - Brecht by way of David Lynch.

Deaf Republic overplays its hand a bit, running a bit too long and repeating its blasts of sudden violence enough to make us numb to them (although that might be partly the point.) But it's successful in employing its premise of showcasing sign as a distinct language like any other, with its own grammar and unique idioms that can't quite be translated or appreciated; for me it's most successful when its visuals tip it over into an eerie, dreamlike place.

Deaf Republic by Dead Centre and Zoë McWhinney, based on the book by Ilya Kaminsky, is booking until the 13th of September at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Downstairs.

Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.