Deaf Republic review – An unsettling, enthralling mix of puppetry, circus, and sign language

London’s Royal Court Theatre hosts an innovative new production that draws resonance from slippery real-world parallels

Caoimhe Coburn Gray and Romel Belcher in ‘Deaf Republic’ (Johan Persson)

In usual terms, describing an experience as a “waking nightmare” is a straightforwardly bad thing. But there’s nothing usual or straightforward about the Royal Court’s unsettling, enthralling Deaf Republic, based on the acclaimed poems of Ukrainian-American author Ilya Kaminsky.

Irish avant-garde theatre company Dead Centre and British Sign Language (BSL) poet Zoë McWhinney have collaborated to create an experimental epic of war and resistance that’ll make you rub your eyes and reach desperately for something real to hold on to. Puppets, circus, signing, film projections, spoken word – in scene after surreal scene, they pile on different storytelling techniques to explore how we talk (or don’t talk) about terrible things.

We’re in a fictional, eastern European-sounding town here, where gun-toting soldiers run the streets and gatherings are forbidden. Despite this, married couple Alfonso (Romel Belcher) and a pregnant Sonya (Caoimhe Coburn Gray) put on a public puppet show. Their deaf nephew attends, and is shot for not understanding a soldier’s command to go home. The next morning, the whole town wakes up deaf – or choosing not to hear this state’s totalitarian commands.

What happens from there on is a matter of interpretation, in more ways than one. In Belcher’s opening BSL speech, he wittily de-centres the hearing audience, upending their expectation that sign language interpreters stay discreetly at the edge of the stage. “Tonight it’s entirely possible that you’ll only really know what’s going on if you’re deaf,” he says. And yes, of course, there’s spoken interpretation and subtitles so everyone can understand. But some things you have to feel in your body.

Here, deafness is a mode of resistance, both because the soldiers can’t understand BSL and because there’s something automatically countercultural about a language where you don’t just speak about injustice but re-enact it with your hands, arms, and the pained expressions on your face. The sign for colonialism is one of having something wrenched away from you, Belcher shows us.

Still, BSL is just one of many modes of expression in Deaf Republic, which obsessively circles around questions of interpretation, language, and who controls the narrative. We see strange, visually sumptuous scenes – through the eyes of a small child watching dancing feet at a wedding; as invisible observers of a bathing couple through a rain-streaked window; as a crowd of onlooking locals at an illicit rally.

There’s a Lynchian menace to the seedy, red-curtained nightclub we shift to as the story progresses. It’s a place where a puppet theatre retells stories to soldiers – until these violent men realise they can grasp the strings and make things happen on its little stage that occur in the real world, too. It’s a metaphor for a puppet state, we’re told: perhaps a reference to the way that Russian powers have tried, over the decades, to keep Ukraine in the palm of their hands.

This story also butts up against the odd contradictions of life in a country at war – that you can still live, go to the mall even, as bombs fall – in a way that seems to speak directly to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. But Deaf Republic is a slippery thing. It won’t be neatly pinned down to one country, one war, or one time period. It resists the easy, misleading clarity of a news report to show a world where normal life has been upended, exploded, silenced. And, fittingly, it leaves its audience grasping for a language to express what they’ve seen.

‘Deaf Republic’ is at the Royal Court Theatre in London until 13 September. Details here