Royal Court Theatre

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...

Let’s first acknowledge that there is not a person alive who is currently torn between spending their birthday theatre vouchers on a choice between either Mamma Mia! or Cow | Deer. Even if you have never heard of the great avant-garde director Katie Mitchell, it seems inconceivable that you would book into her Cow | Deer – a play whose publicity information clearly states that it is about a cow and a deer and features no dialogue – and go expecting a night of high-octane commercial theatre lulz.  The caveat, then, is that if you do think Cow | Deer sounds like a horrible idea then I am not here to convince you otherwise. Don’t take a risk on it! You would probably hate it. See Mamma Mia! Admin over, let’s get down to business. For Mitchell devotees and open-minded souls who think the premise sounds wild enough to be interesting, Cow | Deer is a virtuosic foley performance in which a quartet of actors (Pandora Colin, Tom Espiner, Tatenda Matavai and Ruth Sullivan) deploy a colossal array of objects – from hay bales to hot water bottles – to create the sounds of a cow and also a deer.  They’re augmented by sound design from co-creator Melanie Wilson that is heavy on animal noises (lots of birdsong, lots of cows, ie the actors don’t have to moo) and a script from Nina Segal that imposes a degree of discipline and direction and ultimately a rather haunting ‘story’ about humanity’s disruption of ordered nature. An audacious technical exercise the likes of which you’re unlikely...

David Byrne’s Royal Court seasons have proven almost aggressively eclectic so far, with surefire commercial smashes rubbing up against stuff that comes across as genuinely quite mad. Coming a year after West End transfer Giant made its debut, Nick Payne’s The Unbelievers certainly looks like another big hit: the great Marianne Elliott (War Horse, Curious Incident) will make her debut at the venerable new writing theatre, in Payne’s first Court play since his huge hit Constellations, with design by the legendary Bunnie Christie. The cherry on the cake is the marvellous Nicola Walker, who will star as a woman whose son disappeared seven years ago and for whom time has now fractured, causing her to experience every minute of every year gone by simultaneously. Okay, that’s a pretty mad concept, but if anyone can pull it off it’s this A-Team of theatrical talent.