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.
