Deaf Republic

At a puppet show in a town square, a deaf boy is shot dead by a soldier for not responding to his commands.  The next day the whole town wakes up deaf or pretending to be.  This play at the Royal Court is based on the 2019 book length poem by Ukranian poet Ilya Kaminsky. 

Using signing, spoken and written word, it's also a multimedia work, making use of cameras and projection, puppetry and even a drone hovering intimidatingly over the audience at one point.   The set is deceptively simple in design, with the puppet stage staying central whilst other elements and the cast move around it. The sound design is excellent too, with white noise and low rumbling sounds, sometimes blurred speech, evoking a tiny bit of the deaf experience.  It sounds as if it will be bitty, but it does come together in something of a poetic tapestry.  

This is a complicated play, a fable, with layer upon layer of metaphor and allegory, and despite light and moving moments, and even jokes, this isn’t one where everyone lives happily ever after.  Firstly, there are all the metaphors around deafness, and the opening scene explains that this is an accessible performance so the signing will be translated for the hearing members of the audience- it gets a laugh but also makes a serious point that accommodations being made are rarely satisfactory.  Then there are the demonstrations of the difference in culture that is intertwined in language, whether that be signing, spoken or written, and the gulfs in understanding that follow. The puppet show is used throughout the play too, with clever interplay between the puppets on the little stage which are sometimes projected onto a large screen, sometimes mirrored by the human cast, and back again.  And then there is the war and resistance that is being fought here, an unequal one where one side does not comply but the other side has guns, and language and surtitles are a weapon of war -  'this is an accessible war'.  The bodies being winched up remind us of the puppets, sometimes representing the dead or lynchings, but sometimes performing beautiful aerial acrobatics. Finally we are reminded time and time again, that theatre is not life, we are safely watching a performance.  Ultimately, in showing us life within a war, this play recognises that sometimes there is nothing to be done.  Not an ending we want, but it feels pretty viscerally accurate at the moment.  

As an aside, we were in the cheap seats up in the gods as usual with a great view of the stage, except when the surtitles screen moved to block our view of the puppet stage - a deliberate example of the limitations of accessibility for those of us in the cheap seats, or just an oversight by the production? Who knows, but it was an effective reminder. 

This is a pretty hard core play but very cleverly done.  Despite the multitude of things going on, it really hit the spot for me - a great example of how theatre can bring ideas to life in a different way.  There are probably still tickets available and I’d recommend giving it a go.