Review: Deaf actors perform short play readings in National Theatre’s New Views Festival

Five Deaf actors have taken part in play readings for stories created by deaf students, as part of the National Theatre’s annual New Views Festival for young playwrights aged 14 to 19.

A selection of plays produced by pupils from Eastbury Community School’s Alternative Resource Provision (ARP), grouped under the title of Conversation Breakdown, were made available at the start of the month, with the readings directed by Graeae Theatre’s artistic director Jenny Sealey.

Nina Steiger, the National Theatre’s head of play development and a member of the judging panel, said in a statement: “In what was a landmark year that took a particularly heavy toll on young people and the performing arts, it was thrilling for us to receive over 400 submissions from all over the UK.

“The final plays were about identity, imagination, and love and the bravery of expressing these elements of what makes us human, and perhaps what we’ve missed most in being together.

“That these plays were written at home in lockdown, developed with teachers and mentors over the difficult platform of group Zoom sessions, and that the voices in these plays nevertheless resonate with truthfulness, joy and life force is a testament to the importance of this programme and the self-expression it enables.”

There are five plays which form part of Conversation Breakdown: Deaf Lives by Kweku Odoom, The Lost Brother by Tomisin Fagade, Emma’s Story by Laura Mondim Da Silva, Missed Information by Suheil Suleeyman, and Brotherly Arguments by Rehan Shazad.

The eight actors involved in the readings are Jude Mahon, William Grint, Nadeem Islam, Craig McCulloch, Petre Dobre, Alexandra James, Chris Jack and Mitesh Soni.

While short in length, each one tackles audism or barriers faced by Deaf people from different perspectives, before one character offers a resolution which looks to dismantle the discrimination faced by the Deaf individual. In Emma’s Story, it’s a guilt-ridden father; in Missed Information, it’s a mother facing a communication barrier with her Deaf son. There’s a clear narrative flow to every play, together with a shared theme, which turns them into a powerful anthology as a whole.

Of the five, Deaf Lives is notable for being the only one to explore audism and barriers self-inflicted and internalised by Deaf individuals. We see McCulloch’s character anxious to sign in public with his friend (played by Dobre) and boast both a ‘best hearing friend’ and a ‘best Deaf friend’, as his connection to the Deaf community falters.

Elsewhere, The Lost Brother, starring Islam and Soni, offers an exploration into an audist attitude which is rarely acknowledged in conversations around deaf discrimination, that being the idea of a hearing person refusing to begin the process of understand a Deaf person’s identity. Tom (Islam) is trying desperately hard to be accepted by his incredibly rude and stubborn brother Nick (Soni), who is reluctant to change his behaviour to be more accommodating.

“No way am I gonna try and understand any of this,” he says abruptly at one point in the play. “Why do I have to accept this? What’s this got to do with me?”

As Tom makes perfectly clear in his argument against his brother’s oppression, the issue at hand is that Nick is simply not understanding or accepting Tom’s deafness. In the current political climate, this reluctance to adjust, and be more inclusive (often described, in its most extreme cases, as ‘anti-woke’) no doubt stems from this perception that acceptance is a concession. I’ve had it in conversations with those closest to me, where individuals with outdated views on marginalised communities are hesitant to acknowledge the modern state of play.

Part of what makes the short script so intriguing is that it serves as a microcosm for the social model of disability – in other words, that individuals are not disabled by our condition(s), but rather the infrastructure around us or, in this case, attitudes. As Nick continues to bemoan sign language, we see Tom becoming more and more isolated and visibly hurt.

In an ideal world, it should be understood that Deaf people just want to live out their lives authentically and without barriers, and that those only come along when infrastructure does not consider our needs, or hearing people do not know a level of Deaf awareness or sign language knowledge necessary to break down the communication barrier.

Just as much as hearing people need to ensure that they do not speak over Deaf people, they must continue to work on making themselves more aware of the communication needs of the community. Allyship is an ongoing process, not a case of A to B or a simple tickbox exercise. Here it’s made obvious by the fact that a rocky relationship between two brothers is in need of healing, with Nick needing to learn more about his brother’s Deaf identity to better support him. Out of all the five plays, Nick’s concession, I’d argue, is the most powerful of them all.

Elsewhere, the digital festival’s winning play was from 17-year-old autistic student Mackenzie Wellfare, whose story Perspective explores the challenges faced by Leo, an autistic teenager. It does, of course, draw on his Wellfare’s own lived experience.

The almost 45-minute production is set in his bedroom, with Leo (JJ Green) issuing regular apologies to his best friend Shaun (Kwaku Mills) after every moment of exposition. “I’m sorry,” he’d say. It’s a balancing act for the youngster. When he’s masking and trying to repress a meltdown while maintaining a conversation with his best friend, something will inevitably falter, and we see it more and more as we move up the narrative arc. Leo needs to let it out, but he can’t – not right now.

Though make no mistake: this production isn’t one focussed on pity porn. There is honesty, yes, and as Wellfare says himself, it’s a representation of autism which “hasn’t been truly shown in modern media before”, so to the allistic (that’s ‘non-autistic’) eye, some scenes are striking in their honesty. Others, meanwhile, are vibrant and poetic, such as when Leo stims with a ball, experiencing autistic joy as the floor of his bedroom is awash with multicolour, his movements soundtracked by a calming piano score.

All of this is helped, I should add, by the fact that Green is, himself, autistic. So too is Evlyne Oyedokun, who plays his other friend Emma. Without diving too much into the point that disabled actors should play disabled roles, Green and Oyedokun bring an understanding to their characters which is so effortlessly endearing. “But I’m not a good actor,” Leo says at one point, as he talks about his love of the stage. Green very much is.

Yet when put with Mills’ Shaun, the dynamic between Leo and his best mate falters as a result of Mills’ on-the-nose and over-enthusiastic performance. I’ve never seen a teenager make binoculars with his eyes as he says the word ‘reading’, and his straight and less laid-back pronunciation of the word ‘dude’ is jarring and distracting. There is an argument to be made that the exaggeration is justified given what unfolds later in the play – a revelation which Mills delivers with conviction, though I’ll keep vague for the avoidance of spoilers – but it doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny. Most friends, in whatever form they may be, do not behave in this way, and if you saw Mills’ performance as an excitable superfan in Dark Sublime, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Perspectives is a play about grounding, and – like the Conversation Breakdown collection of readings – what it means to understand. As an inner voice tempts Leo to ‘let it out’, the story’s conclusion offers a centralisation which is optimistic and reassuring. To be understood is to experience liberation, and these two films convey that with heartfelt sincerity.

Anyone interested in watching Perspective or the Conversation Breakdown collection of play readings can contact the National Theatre at newviews@nationaltheatre.org.uk or via their website to request the link. The video can be watched online until 6 August, with British Sign Language (BSL) and captions available.

Images: National Theatre (New Views) and Cameron Slater Photography (Perspective).

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is a mildly deaf freelance journalist and campaigner from Bedfordshire. He wears bilateral hearing aids and can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.