Dublin’s Dead Centre is a true marvel, a theatre company that makes intensely visceral works that feel like they’ve been wrenched from a beautiful dream and a screaming nightmare simultaneously.
Written and directed by the company’s Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel in collaboration with BSL poet Zoë McWhinney, Deaf Republic is an adaptation of Ukrainian writer Ilya Kaminsky’s 2019 poetry collection of the same name, which concerns a town occupied by a hostile power in which the locals all go deaf after a soldier shoots a young deaf boy.
What is Deaf Republic about?
It’s clearly quite a lot about Russia’s 2014 occupation of eastern Ukraine. It’s a fictional story set in a fictional town in an unnamed country, and the R word is never spoken once. But even if it weren’t for a couple of direct allusions to Ukraine, it would be glaringly apparent which contemporary occupation Deaf Republic was predominantly a response to. That said, it wilfully evades specificity, and its vision of the bleak absurdity of life under a hostile power clearly has resonance with Gaza as well as the Donbas.
It is about deafness. Allegorically speaking, townspeople’s sudden loss of hearing feels synonymous with resistance. The question of whether they’re really deaf is a slippery one - the short answer is some of them are, a couple of them appear not to be. But their apparent inability to hear the enemy baffles and frustrates the occupying soldiers (all played by Dylan Tonge) who growls that they should be grateful, not difficult).
But it is also about actual deafness. We see the first half of Deaf Republic through the eyes of Sonya (Caoimhe Coburn-Gray) and Alfonso (Romel Belcher), a couple from the village. But Belcher is actually deaf: in a very mischievous introduction, he uses Coburn-Gray as his interpreter to explain that’s she’s there to increase the production’s accessibility by allowing non-deaf people to understand it - he proceeds to use her as a puppet (a theme that will be returned to), coming up with ever more absurd things for her to say, which she simply goes along with.
Moreover, Deaf Republic has clear echoes of Dead Centre’s superb breakthrough Lippy, which was concerned with lip reading and gulfs in human communication. In one haunting video sequence in Deaf Republic, seemingly relayed live but presumably pre-recorded, a camera seems to drift down an actor’s ear canal, showing it to us at bizarrely magnified, alien scale. Kidd and Moukarzel are fascinated by the way in which people communicate, or fail to communicate, or exist in the same spaces but experience two completely different interpretations of the world: deaf/hearing, occupier/occupied, Russian/Ukrainian, audience/performer.
Finally there are puppets: Sonya and Alfonso run a puppet show in the middle of the town - they tell their own story via marionettes, which also represent the dead boy and other people in the town. Sometimes an actor will break the fourth wall to excoriate us for not doing anything and just sitting there; sometimes they glibly allude to it being a play and not really mattering; later an incarnation of Tonge’s soldier talks approvingly of manipulating people like puppets.
For a show based on a set of poems and co-adapted by a second poet, the language is mostly fairly simple - witty and puckish, but not poetry in terms of meter etc (although I think the nature of McWhinney’s BSL poetry is different – certainly there is a lot of fun had playing with the somewhat malleable nature of the medium).
But Dead Centre is not at heart a text driven company, and it’s on a visceral level that Kidd and Moukarzel and their formidable creative team really work, with Kaminsky’s poems the starting point rather than the end. A malevolently gaudy nightclub sequence is pure Lynch. A scene in which Sonya and Alfonso take a bath together is intensely moving, as they briefly drift away from the occupation into a wider cosmos. Kevin Gleeson’s droning sound design is gorgeous and primal. The interplay of Grant Gee’s dreamy video work and the gauzy scrims that descend from the ceiling is beautiful and disorientating. Jeremy Herbert’s set includes a full-sized car, which is just very cool.
Dead Centre resists close textual analysis, because they’re about texture and feeling and making intangible ideas and unsettling emotions briefly manifest in the real world. Deaf Republic is a ravishing and unnerving play about deafness, occupation, resistance, puppets and things that hover outside the edge of comprehension.
