Deaf Republic by Dead Centre & Zoe McWhinney. The Royal Court Jerwood Theatre, Sloane Square, London until 13 September, 2025 4☆☆☆☆. Review: William Russell.
Photo Credit: Johan Persson.
Deaf Republic by Dead Centre & Zoe McWhinney. The Royal Court Jerwood Theatre, Sloane Square, London until 13 September, 2025
4☆☆☆☆. Review: William Russell.
“Powerful and visually stunning.“
The production is astonishing, the play, while it has much to say worth saying about the world today and its wars like the one being waged in Ukraine, is, however really not saying anything that has not been said before and the whole deaf context, while interesting, is dramatically soporific. What keeps one watching is how it is staged, the use of the puppet theatre in the town's square, a town where everyone is deaf, and the way it suddenly becomes the whole stage and the puppets turn in to living people with the action being shown on screens that descend, sometimes through the screens, before one's eyes with sometimes departing at the end of a cord up into the flies like puppets in that theatre. The words are delivered by that at the side of the stage commentator or shown as surtitles with the characters communicating in sign language. There is a neat opening joke about the replacement of that irritating signer with a person who speaks but it does wear thin as the evening proceeds. In other words - what is before your eyes is breathtaking, what you are listening to or being told one way, or the other is wearying although the material on which it is based, the poetry of the Ukrainian Ilya Kaminsky is undeniably powerful. As an experiment in using sign language and deaf artists it is interesting but that still does not make this an edge of the seat experience. We follow what happens to a young couple, Alonso and Sonya, and their baby in the town of Vasinka where a ten-year-old deaf child has just been killed by a soldier for not doing as he was told. This seems to have turned the population deaf and sign language, which the soldiers do not understand, becomes the way they communicate and resist. There is, actually, only on actor playing all the soldiers because they are all the same. It works as a way of making one understand what happens when a people are subjugated to an invading power – it becomes something all pervading, not a collection of individuals, but an entity. It is not an evening to miss, and much of it is very moving especially that ascent to the heavens at the end, but it does have its moments when attention flags and communication between the hearing and the signers fails.
Cast
RomelBelcher, Caoimhe Coburn Gray, Derbhie Crotty, Kate Finegan, Eoin Gleeson, Lisa Kelly, Dylan Tonge Jones.
Creatives
Directors - Bush Moukarzei, Benn Kidd.
Set Designer – Jeremy Herbert.
Costume Designer – Mae Leahy.
Lighting Designer – Azusa Ono
Video Director – Grant Gee.
Aerial Consultants – Chrissue Ardill, Kat Cooley.
Puppetry Consultant – Cillian O'Donnachadha.
Intimacy Coordinator – Roisin O'Donevan.
Fight Choreographer – Ciaran O'Grady.
Video Programmer – Mike Dunne.
