Deaf Republic, Royal Court review - beautiful images, shame about the words

The Ukraine war is not the only place of horror in the world, but it does present a challenge to theatre makers who want to respond to events that dominate the news. And which make us all feel powerless, including our leaders. Instead of staging a play such as Bad Roads, Ukrainian playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s savage 2017 account of the conflict, the Royal Court has chosen a meta-theatrical and metaphorical response. 

Adapted from the 2019 book of poems by Ukrainian-American author Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic is a contemporary fable of war, atrocity and resistance. A collaboration between Dublin-based Dead Centre theatre company and sign language poet Zoë McWhinney, this staging uses a mixture of spoken word, British Sign Language and creative captioning through which an ensemble of deaf and hearing actors, and aerial performers, act out the story, also employing puppetry and onstage film.

The ghastliness of war in a country occupied by a foreign army is presented through three main stories: in the first, a deaf boy is killed by a soldier for disobeying an order which he was never able to hear. In the second, a young mother is abducted by the military while her husband is out shopping. In the third, a brothel owner runs a slaughterhouse where the occupying soldiers are routinely killed by the sex workers. These fragments are a mixture of the gut-wrenchingly absurd, the horribly ordinary and the very unlikely. But their power comes from the fact that they comment on, or are in some form happening, not only in Ukraine, but also in Gaza and other places across the world. 
Deaf Republic graphically shows how war is bad news for everyone, but especially bad news for women and children. But how can you effectively dramatize this banal message? Theatre usually has a choice of three approaches: a verbatim account, an individual writer’s vision or a devised work. Dead Centre have chosen a meta-theatrical physical-theatre method, which uses overt showmanship to tell its stories. So the evening begins with Romel Belcher telling us about deafness in sign language, while Caoimhe Coburn Gray translates this into the spoken word. The actors, who adopt the personalities of Alfonso and Sonya, then create an onstage puppet theatre, put up in the town square of the fictional Vasenka, which is where the deaf child Petya, Sonya’s nephew, is shot by a soldier. The next day, as an act of resistance, the whole town wakes up deaf.

The visual effects of the show, which is beautifully designed by Jeremy Herbert, are gently amusing: the onstage puppet theatre is shown in close up through video, then we are thrown back onto the real-life staging. The puppets leave the miniature theatre and wander across the stage, killed bodies are hauled up by wires, a trapeze artist performs an ariel dance, lights and snow effects create a dazzling effect while moments of music and dancing give relief from the horrors. And some of the horrors are pretty in-yer-face: a soldier is butchered in video close up. By contrast, in one touchingly quiet scene, Sonya and Alfonso lovingly share a bath.

The mains gestures of this show are welcome: deafness, often seen as a disability, here is an act of revolt. While most plays struggle to be made accessible to those with impaired hearing, this one cheekily introduces itself as being made specially accessible to those who can’t understand sign language (Belcher apologizes to deaf audience members for the distraction of his translator). Some passages are performed in sign without surtitles. The central implication that the deaf understand the world better than the hearing carries its own suggestive power. And because, in the story, the occupiers can’t understand signing, this is a secret language, a form of defiance.

Similarly, the metaphorical use of puppets implies that we are all being manipulated by unseen hands, someone always pulling our strings. We have little control over our leaders, little power to stop wars, or even to effectively protest against them. We are not only puppets, but ineffectual suckers. Likewise, for every soldier killed, another identical one appears in an endless flow of troops. The constant deaths, of townspeople as well as invaders, make the audience into a body of complicit voyeurs, who are also encouraged to feel voyeuristic about the spectacle of deafness itself.

Personally, I’m not a fan of this show. Having three writers (Bush Moukarzel, Ben Kidd and McWhinney) and two directors (Moukarzel and Kidd) means the writing lacks individual character, and, as is typical with devised work, the storytelling is slack. At 110 minutes, it is at least 20 minutes too long, and there is too much repetition, too much inconsequentiality. The politics of the piece, which is too meta-theatrical and self-conscious for its own good, are bland and banal: the message, often proclaimed in brain-numbing hectoring, swings from hopelessly idealistic ideas of resistance to equally hopeless despair that nothing ever changes. Serious intent is compromised by the urge to entertain, to create a fun show.

That said, the cast is pretty committed: Belcher’s Alfonso and Coburn Gray’s Sonya are likeable, even if we never find out enough about them to feel for their plight. Derbhle Crotty’s Galya, leader of the resistance, is a strong stage presence, while Lisa Kelly (pictured above with Crotty), Kate Finegan and Eoin Gleeson portray characters that are only vaguely sketched in. Dylan Tonge Jones gives the soldiers an unsettling matter-of-fact casual cruelty. Deaf Republic will be enjoyed more by those who like visual entertainment than those who, like me, are searching for evidence of new writing talent at the theatre that insists on calling itself “the writers’ theatre”.

• Deaf Republic at the Royal Court until 13 September  
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk

@AleksSierz