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.

Theatre review: In the Night Time (Before the Sun Rises)

My ongoing attempts to see less theatre always seem to come up against snags; I'd stopped myself from booking for In the Night Time (Before the Sun Rises) at the Gate, as the blurb about a couple kept up all night by their baby didn't really pique my interest. But then Alex Waldmann and Adelle Leonce were announced as the couple and it suddenly seemed harder to skip. Their nameless couple are young, but not so young they don't know what they're doing when they get together - they're a good match and have a fun, stable relationship, living together for some years although not getting married (he'd like to but she doesn't believe in it.) Even a well-adjusted pair aren't a match for the strain put on them by a baby though, and the two narrate the story of a particularly difficult night. Their immediate worries about how well they can look after their daughter get swamped by larger ones about the world they've brought her into.

Theatre review: Lippy

In last year's Blurred Lines, one scene made its point in the rather meta way of dramatising a post-show discussion with the creatives. In Bush Moukarzel's Lippy, this Q&A conceit becomes the framing device for a whole show about putting words into other people's mouths. It makes for a nicely disarming start to the evening, to have Moukarzel welcome the audience "back" and begin to talk about a show they haven't actually seen and doesn't really exist. With the help of a techie (Adam Welsh, also the composer and sound desginer) who doesn't always seem to be paying much attention, he interviews an actor who is also a Lip Reader (David Heap,) a talent around which the preceding show was built. It's an ability he's also sometimes been asked to use to help police inquiries, and one case particularly haunts him - of being asked to interpret the last known CCTV footage of some women who made a suicide pact.

Theatre review: Spring Awakening

A play best known for scandalising audiences in the late 19th century is always going to have trouble creating quite as much impact in the 21st. Any production of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening now has an additional hurdle if it wants to stand out, as Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's musical version raised the bar in its irreverence and energy. The last production of the straight play I saw felt dry, like it was simply missing the songs, but Headlong is the kind of company that exists to see things differently, and this new version quickly imprints its own identity on the play. It's the story of Melchior (Oliver Johnstone,) a nihilistic teenager at the centre of a group of friends trying, with limited success, to tackle growing up. The adults in their lives are no help, in fact whether they're putting undue pressure on their children or leaving important gaps in their sexual education, they're most often a hindrance.

Theatre review: The Shawl

The Young Vic's tiny Clare studio seems to be becoming the home for the winners of directing awards: Having already played host to the JMK winner, we now get the Genesis Future Director's Award winner, Ben Kidd. He brings an interesting dynamic to The Shawl, the short 1985 play in which David Mamet returns to his recurring theme of con-artists, this time looking at mediums whose comforting messages from the dead are entirely bogus - or are they? Kidd's production opens with a beautifully spooky touch: Merle Hensel's design sees chairs bolted down in a fairly haphazard-seeming in-the-round configuration, and as the audience take their seats a security camera's live images are shown on a number of TV screens, scattered around the cardboard boxes that line the walls. But when the play starts and Miss A (Denise Gough) enters, with some trepidation, for her first consultation with a psychic, the TV screens show her entering a deserted room, as if the audience are now spirits the cameras can't pick up.