I’m fed of up of actors who can hear taking deaf roles
tiring. So I prefer to see a range of elements in a piece, so that the story is carried – perhaps through physicality, Visual Vernacular, and so on – so that the hearing audience can follow. If it’s just sign language on the stage, you’ll quickly lose your hearing audience - in the same way that a deaf audience will disengage from a theatre piece that’s just talking heads, just spoken dialogue. It’s the same thing.
As deaf theatre-makers, actors, and companies, we’re really aware of this. We know how to mix it up, how to provide an accessible balance. But, unfortunately, there are many companies out there who don’t think about it. They’re focussed on looking good, and they’re not thinking about access at all.
Do you think deaf actors are still limited to playing deaf characters? What kind of characters would you like to play?
Well, having said I disagree with hearing actors taking deaf roles, I think I should qualify that because not all deaf people are deaf in the same way, and they don’t all use sign language. So you might have someone who is hard of hearing, or there are degrees of deafness, or someone may have been born hearing and become deaf, and so on. So it would depend on the story being told.
If it’s the story of someone born hearing who becomes deaf as an adult, then that might be a suitable part for a hearing actor to play. But to have a hearing actor play a character who was born and raised as a deaf person – well, that’s where I start to have objections.
But putting that aside, I’d say a deaf actor could play a hearing character, for example if a deaf actor can speak well. It’s not for me to say how that would play to a hearing audience, mind you, but it seems to me that could work.
And if we go back to the era of the silent movies when acting was physical and there wasn’t any dialogue, then a deaf actor could play any role, of course.
Extraordinary Wall of Silence comes to the Birmingham Hippodrome’s Patrick Studio on January 22 and 23. See birminghamhippodrome.com