New column – new playwriting ingenuity

The beauty of practising contemporary visual art is the limitless scope for imagination that it affords. It is this that gives the critic incentive to extend current interests to artistic disciplines that would formerly never get a second glance.

Although multi-disciplinary art has existed for decades now, Deaf Arts seem not to have quite reached that stage yet. Of course, exceptions such as Aaron Williamson and Sign Dance Collective spring to mind, although these tend towards the ‘deaf and disabled’ sensibility rather than a specific deaf cultural focus.

Within the creative Deaf/BSL Community, the divide between the performing arts and visual art remains. One rarely sees deaf performers at art gallery private views, while deaf visual artists becoming extras on BBC TV’s Switch don’t count as multi-disciplinary: they just need the money.

Hence the column. Each month, an aspect of Deaf Arts will be covered in the form of a review, opinion piece or profile. Not that one hopes to generate a school of multidisciplinary creative thinking: perish the thought. Rather, the aim is to explore and celebrate Deaf Arts in its entirety.

Thus it begins with Deafinitely Theatre. Their last production, Lipstick and Lollipops - Charlie Swinbourne’s playwriting debut – didn’t impress, due to a storyline rather too reminiscent of Eastenders to feel truly original, and a habit for characters to appear at cross-purposes, confounding all sense of time and space.

Given the company’s past output, however – dramas have explored cochlear implant politics, Nazi deaf genocide, and dysfunctional family life - it could be safely assumed that future plays would not repeat such mistakes.

Indeed, both Deafinitely Creative - a showcase of eight pieces by deaf writers – and Double Sentence, Deafinitely Theatre’s new work-in-progress, both of which were staged at Oval House Theatre over two nights, showed evidence of both a return to form and potential for further ingenuity.

To detail every one of the eight shorts-in-progress - developed over four intensive monthly sessions in London following a week-long residential writing course in Shropshire – would be impossible.

Nevertheless Mary-Jayne Russell de Clifford’s Buttercup (a charming story about an orphaned nun trying to avoid the laundry man’s attentions), Aliya Gulamani’s Energy (love and life in an unusual industrial climate) and Norma McGilp’s Hold The Line (a cracking dialogue between a deaf woman and her interpreter wrestling for control) should all be noted.

More anticipation was reserved for Double Sentence. Taking place on a black stage - unadorned save for a white-tape floor grid – the story concerns Tom Fry (Matthew Gurney), a Deaf BSL user adapting to prison life. After attempts to co-operate with staff and inmates fail to overcome the proverbial linguistic barrier, he is visited by Anna (Emma Case), a clinical psychologist with sign language skills, who could provide just the lifeline he needs.

Sadly, the respite is short-lived: another psychologist, Mary (the estimable Caroline Parker), brought in for a second opinion, lacks Anna’s communication skills and misinterprets Tom’s frustrated requests as an act of insanity. As a result, solitary confinement is recommended.

So far, so expected. This was classic issues-driven theatre that drew from four months’ research involving Deaf prisoners and ex-offenders for the first time and Deafinitely Theatre’s own political inclinations.

Its lucidity, however, was a surprise. A 20-minute preview following just two weeks of script development this might have been, but Double Sentence indicated an impeccably tight, absorbing story that brought home the appallingly bleak prognosis that many Deaf BSL prisoners face, commanding strong performances all-round.

Co-writers Andrew Muir – an actor and playwright responsible for the award-winning Green Grass, Push (selected as Time Out Critic’s Choice) and The Owl’s Nest – and Paula Garfield, Deafinitely’s Artistic Director, hope to go on national tour with Double Sentence in late 2009 (depending on funding) once scripting is complete.

One looks forward to what could lie in store – although not necessarily for poor Tom.

Visit www.deafinitelytheatre.co.uk for news of future developments.

(c) Melissa Mostyn 2009

Just a thought...

Recently I have been thinking about illusions, and how important they are to disabled people. For example, I am assured that those who are skilled in lip-reading and signing can actually 'hear' the sound of speech in their minds, by means of 'educated illusion'.

My lip-reading is very poor, so I have to turn on the subtitles when I watch TV. I also turn off the sound, because I find the ever-present 'background' jingles very distracting. How I hate them. Clearly the perpetrators assume that these silly scraps of music can be shuffled backwards and forwards in the ear of the listener, like mental playing cards in a pack.

Certainly an old-fashioned gramophone record is solid enough, and its single groove is spirally shaped. Yet the plain truth is that the music itself only has two dimensions. And you only have to watch the unilateral wobble of the gramophone needle, to understand this.

In the same way, it can be shown that not only live sound, but also the action of the human ear-drum, are two-dimensional. In other words, both actions are composed of nothing more than a frequency of response and a varying degree of energy.

Yet we talk about stereophonic speakers and omni-directional microphones, as if sound was something round and solid, like an invisible dome. Why is this?

I would suggest four possible answers.

First, thanks to the gift of perceptual projection, we have the illusion that the sensations that our ears are experiencing are actually originating somewhere in the distance. We talk about 'the sound of distant gun-fire,' or of 'hearing voices in the garden next door'.

But of course this magical effect does not apply to sound alone. It applies to our other four senses as well. For example, it applies whenever a blind man is feeling his way with a stick. In his mind, it is the tip of the stick which senses the various objects. Whereas in fact it is the sensors in his arm and finger muscles that are responsible.

The second answer is that, with the exception of a few clever animals and machines, most originators of sound transmit the noise all around them. And it is often possible, even for people who have hearing disabilities, to identify each of these sources by turning the head, and cupping the hands around the ears, etc. It's simply a matter of directing the ear to catch the sound waves at the best angle. In other words, as near to ninety degrees as possible.

The third answer, as all lip-readers and ventriloquists know, is psychological. For example, when you see the lips and eyes of a doll moving, the assumption that she is talking to you, is irresistible.

Finally, in real life, different sounds are very often originating in several places at once. Hence the TV/Radio broadcaster's compulsion to load a number of recorded sounds onto a single track, by post-productive editing. Thus, although the end result comes from a single loud-speaker, the idea is to make us feel that we are physically surrounded by a full orchestra of noise-makers.

And it's this crafty little trick that all those who suffer from intrusive TV & Radio jingle should bear in mind, when complaining!


By Richard Tomalin, 'Pipedown' TV/ Radio music sub-campaign.