A town under military occupation refuses to buckle under. After a young deaf boy is shot while watching a puppet show, the citizens of Vasenka fall deaf themselves: refusing to speak, respond, even to hear military orders.
The dramatic, book-length poem from 2019 by Ukrainian-born Ilya Kaminsky becomes an elaborately imagined theatrical fable from Dublin’s Dead Centre: not consoling, sometimes laborious, always demanding vigilance.
If deafness is metaphor in Kaminsky’s poem, here it is a potent theatrical force. Dead Centre’s writer-directors Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd team up with sign language poet Zoë McWhinney. The spoken dialogue doesn’t capture Kaminsky’s flinty concision or wild incantation, but signing impels the show: a vivid choreography of communication. Signing, speech and surtitles are variously combined; panic and violence are loud in every register.
Deaf citizens stand blank-faced before a soldier’s jokes and threats until he resorts to captions (“this is an accessible war!”). Their gestures are lyrical, witty, calmly insurgent, but refusal only goes so far. “Poems are no match for a man with a machine gun,” warns baleful puppeteer Momma Galya (a louche and gritty Derbhle Crotty).
The plush textures of Kevin Gleeson’s sound design often blur and muffle the speaking world. Townsquare chatter and traffic envelop us, then falls silent. The story’s central couple (warmly played by Romel Belcher and Caoimhe Coburn Gray) are beguiling guides, often appearing in marionette form. Puppets become a vivid image of childish innocence turned sour, of people struggling to steer their own destinies. In death, humans are hauled up on ropes, defiance reduced to deadweight carcass.
Artistic director David Byrne’s Royal Court continues to expand the theatre’s notion of authorship: ensembles can be auteurs. Dead Centre are masters of meta-theatrical dazzle. Here, we rarely watch in a single register. Live film sits atop the stage picture. Scenes are screened in dollhouse miniature then replicated at full scale (ingenious designs by Jeremy Herbert). A hovering drone scans the audience. There are so many moving parts that spectatorship becomes a testing exercise in awareness. Yet the production ultimately asks us to sit with defeat – a hard road, even if it fits our current geopolitical moment.
• At Royal Court theatre, London, until 13 September, then at the Samuel Beckett theatre, Dublin, 2-5 October, as part of Dublin Theatre festival
