Review: Sophie Woolley’s Augmented (last chance to see it online for free tonight!)

Watch Augmented online, for free HERE – until midnight, Friday 15th January!

Sophie Woolley was performing her one-woman show Augmented (directed by Rachel Baghsaw and supported by theatre company Told by an Idiot) last March when the first lockdown hit, forcing her to cancel tour dates.

Happily, there was another chance to catch an online version of this deeply personal show about becoming a ‘deaf cyborg’ for a few days online this week, via the Southbank Centre’s fifth Unlimited festival. Necessarily it’s digital this year, and it celebrates a range of deaf and disabled artists and companies.

Augmented is interpreted, audio described and captioned, with the words of the script projected on to the back of the set as Woolley utters them. It relates the story of her journey back into the hearing world thanks to her cochlear implant, fitted by a “surgeon with a God complex” back in 2013. It’s a process she likens to “going deaf, but in reverse”.

The writer and actor, who has been previously interviewed here on Limping Chicken, begins the solo story when she was a nine-year-old living in Harlesden in the early 1980s, helping her deaf mother with things like answering the phone while herself “even able to hear silence”. Indeed, the relationship with her mum is touched on movingly throughout.

Gradually, as Woolley takes us through the late 1990s and early 2000s, her hearing starts to fade, just as she grows up and starts frequenting nightclubs. There’s a great scene involving a confused phone call via Text Relay when her then boyfriend (now husband) is working away, which beautifully captures the occasional torment trying to have an intimate conversation via the service.

By 2011, she can’t hear her own feet, although she still creeps around taking care not to make too much noise – “because it feels nice to help hearing people”.

There’s an equally great (if excruciating) moment where Woolley finds herself in a room with the writer Jon Ronson, and is unable to communicate with him because her interpreter is away sick that day, and her palpable, extreme and understandable frustration is brilliantly conveyed.

There are some superb lines and sloshes of humour (“hearing people are such twats when it comes to noise tolerance”; “we need to arm ourselves against the hearing supremacy”).

Woolley also makes great use of the space, moving around the minimalist set constantly and bringing huge energy to every second of the performance. At the same time, the soundscape from Adrienne Quartly, comprising music, recordings and more, and all conveyed in the captions, adds immeasurably to the whole thing.

At one point, we see Woolley dancing in silence, as music is streamed directly to her auditory nerve.

The writing, some of it developed in improvisation workshops, and the quality of the script are pretty much pitch-perfect, and Woolley does well at conveying the tension between her deaf and hearing selves. (“I still have deaf thoughts,” she says, even after the implant. “I don’t know how to be hearing or deaf”. ) At times, during her deafness, she wonders “what a hearing me would have been doing”.)

Key to the implant journey is the memory of a holiday home at which she was enjoying a cup of tea with her loved ones, but then they suddenly disappeared to the car, somehow having decided to go to the beach without her getting the memo. Now, post-implant, in a neat reversal, she is the one walking forwards, her family now the ones who are ‘still drinking tea’.

She is fond of describing her post-implant identity as a ‘deaf cyborg’. Towards the end of the piece, she muses that perhaps one day all hearing people will have implants, to tailor their experience of sound at will, the ‘augmented’ of the title.

The ending is also lovely, describing her husband saying her name on a mountain walk, her being able to hear and that being enough.

As someone who has recently embarked on the cochlear implant adventure myself, I was always likely to find Augmented mesmerising. I also enjoyed Woolley’s clear-eyed honesty and courage. Equally, she doesn’t shy away from the fact that the journey is not an easy one, that the implant is no miracle cure. (“The new improved washing up liquid does not exist.”)

The play also served as a reminder, if it were needed, of just how subjectively we experience our senses and identities.

Apart from anything else, simply being able to sit back and enjoy some proper theatre after the long (and still not over) months of lockdown, knowing that others were watching at the same time, was a rare and refreshing treat.

Even better, I stuck around for a Q and A session at the end, which heightened the sense of this being a collaborative experience. And it was interesting to hear, for example, how there had to be ‘different versions of Sophie’ – writer and performer – and that one identity would have to be temporarily suspended while she was being the other one.

Anyway. Whether she’s writing or performing, I’ll certainly look forward to seeing more of her work in the future.

Review by Juliet England

Photo: Helen Murray