In a town occupied by an invading army, a young deaf boy is shot and killed because he cannot hear a soldier’s warning to leave the area. In the morning, the town’s entire population wakes up deaf. Is it a symptom of collective somatic empathy or an act of civil resistance?
Adapted from a book by Ukrainian/American poet Ilya Kaminsky, this extraordinary piece of theatre asks many questions about society, totalitarianism and complicity. Directed and written by Dublin-based Dead Centre (Bush Moukarzel & Ben Kidd) with Zoë McWhinney and performed by actors both hearing and deaf, it employs sign language, text, puppetry and video to engage the audience in ways that other ‘immersive’ productions can only dream about.
In an amusing reversal of the norm, Romel Belcher signs to us while Caoimhe Coburn Gray interprets through speech about the nature of the performance before taking on the roles of husband Alfonso and wife Sonya. Their puppet show is responsible for an illegal assembly in the town square of Vasenka where the boy is shot. Guilt, anger and a strange stoicism combine as the story unfolds through astonishing imagery – sometimes tender as when Sonya and Alfonso share a bath while bombs explode outside, sometimes horrific as gunshots blast through heads and bodies and a soldier has his throat cut in close-up.
Dead bodies are hoisted into the air like redundant marionettes, close-ups of the action onstage are projected onto a diaphanous screen in front of the stage as if we are watching events unfold in two dimensions simultaneously. Painted girls in a nightclub lure soldiers (all played by Dylan Tongue Jones) into a back room for sex before despatching them with knives.
Interrogations and torture continue as we watch, incapable of preventing them, even when questioned on our inability or unwillingness to act. Silence becomes a weapon; words are malleable and too compromised – appearing in surtitles when speech stops and then disappearing altogether in sequences conducted solely in sign language.
Thematically linked to Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language and executed with the bravura, multimedia approach of Complicité (credited as co-producers), it opens a portal into the kind of theatrical experience that is increasingly rare, inviting accessibility before denying it by shutting down some of the experiential avenues. It’s not just the puppets whose strings are being pulled, but who are the manipulators? At the climax, a drone hovers around the stage, filming the audience and we, the witnesses.
It’s just theatre, folks. It didn’t happen. Nothing we have seen is real. The town Vasenka doesn’t exist. But somewhere it does. Unmissable.
DEAF REPUBLIC AT THE ROYAL COURT TO SEPTEMBER 13