Deaf Republic
Samuel Beckett Theatre
★★★★★
The play begins with deliberate simplicity, assembling its story piece by piece. Romel Belcher, who is deaf, steps forward to introduce Caoimhe Coburn Gray as his onstage interpreter for the hearing audience, followed by an interrogation of what “accessibility” really means. “That’s why we go to the theatre: to understand the world, to make it accessible.” It’s not a particularly promising opening, a little worthy in tone, but what follows quickly overturns expectations.
The cautious framing gives way to the central event that drives the play: in the fictional town of Vasenka, a deaf boy is shot during a puppet show in the town square for failing to hear a military command. The next morning the entire town goes deaf. From this parable of resistance Dead Centre and the Royal Court Theatre have built a work of staggering beauty, turning Ilya Kaminsky’s 2019 poetry collection Deaf Republic into a complex, layered and hallucinatory piece of theatre.
Directed by Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel, with Senan Dunne as Irish Sign Language translator, and also featuring Derbhle Crotty, Kate Finegan, Eoin Gleeson and Lisa Kelly, the production blends deaf and hearing actors in a fluent interplay of sign, spoken English and projected text. Puppetry, trapeze and live video are intricately woven together.
An early wedding scene seizes the audience’s attention and never lets go. A translucent gauze descends and a hand-held camera projects real-time footage from the perspective of the deaf (now dead) child. The camera lingers on a woman’s red-lipped mouth as she speaks, her words rendered in subtitles: “What do you see between my lips?” Behind the gauze the bride spins in ghostly blue light to a warped, underwater version of Dancing Queen. Kevin Gleeson’s sound design transforms the familiar melody into something decaying and half-remembered.
Deaf Republic, at Dublin Theatre Festival, is daring, intricate and, above all, beautiful
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From this moment the play grips the audience completely, pulling us into its intricate, dreamlike world. The play’s sensibility and aesthetic are intensely, even self-consciously Lynchian. One sequence takes the camera down an ear, into its waxy, tunnelled interior. Tenderness and beauty coexist with rape and torture. People die and return, lines repeat and refract, time folds in on itself. There are nocturnal scenes lit by car headlights, and eerie dances in a nightclub with red, pulsing walls. Characters behave unexpectedly, as if veering off script: at one point the sadistic soldier tells a pretty decent joke, somehow more sinister in his sudden goofiness.
The production’s use of live video and projections is striking. Drone footage of the audience plays back at us. It doesn’t make immediate sense, but it works. The layered perspectives create real intensity, showing how techniques from cinema can be used to make theatre feel less fusty.
Kaminsky’s poetry surfaces unexpectedly, cutting through the visual and sonic layers with its searing moral clarity: “At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?”
Deaf Republic is avant-garde theatre at its most exciting: daring, intricate and, above all, beautiful, full of images that seem plucked straight from the dark unconscious.
Runs at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Sunday, October 5th
