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: 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.