It’s difficult to know when the alchemy kicks in, but Dan Rebellato’s new play starts out a tooth-gratingly awful experience and ends up a triumph of haunting drama. The lights go up on the kind of set an angst-ridden teen might dream up to Morrissey: two gargantuan speakers and a giant reverb bar. And when the dialogue begins, it’s the kind of earnest, stuttering, to-audience performance that has you shrinking in your seat.
But Rebellato dips his hands so deep into his subject matter: deafness, death and music’s transcendent ability to communicate, that he pulls off a radical reversal of fortunes. By the time Chris, a music aficionado whose life was ruptured when he lost his hearing in a car accident, dies from a brain haemorrhage, leaving his wife, fellow muso and religiously minded sister scrabbling around in the dustheap of grief, it’s mesmerising theatre.
Partly this is down to the production’s impassioned, unforced, entirely credible love of indie music, which underscores every metaphor and punchlines every joke. The cleverness of the play creeps up in Graham Eatough and Jenny Sealey’s plainly staged, unhurried production, because the ideas of signing and language, silence and loss, belief and rationality are examined with a rare and careful depth. Pauline Lockhart anchors a fine cast as the defiant widow Sarah, endlessly replaying a compilation tape Chris was making when he died in search of some sign of him. It remains overly earnest and occasionally frustrating, since little attempt is made to translate the sign language on stage. But this darkness of meaning makes such contextual sense that, like so much else about this homespun, gentle production, you end up not only forgiving, but applauding it.
