In Vasenka, a fictional town under military occupation, a deaf boy is shot by soldiers and the town’s inhabitants become deaf in response. The opening of Deaf Republic – the remarkable second collection by the Ukrainian-American poet and translator Ilya Kaminsky – sets in train a narrative of resistance through silence, as “deafness, an insurgency, begins” and the soldiers start executing the citizens of Vasenka, who refuse to hear their orders.
Since its publication in 2019, Deaf Republic has won multiple awards and been critically lauded for what the former poet laureate Andrew Motion has described as “a folk drama that feels archetypal, yet is deeply revealing of our here and now”. That quality of being current, urgent in its commentary on war yet as timeless as a fable, appealed to Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, co-directors of theatre company Dead Centre, who have adapted the work for stage.
“Kaminsky’s genius is to make the reader feel they understand more than they do,” says Kidd in between rehearsals in Dublin. “Yet some of the poems are inscrutable. The choice to use a story, the narrative of what happens to the townspeople, is important. Then he drops in his lyric poems and you’re stopped short. There are two things going on formally, and it suggests itself as a piece that could be adapted.”
Kaminsky, who lost his own hearing as a child and did not have hearing aids until he moved to the US in his teens, also incorporates sign language symbols into his text, which are a mixture of American and Ukrainian signs. In the book he wanted to reflect his experience of being an immigrant in the US, while also frequently returning to Ukraine.
“I was living with one foot in both places,” he says, speaking online from the US. To reflect this, the central narrative is bookended by two poems – We Lived Happily During the War and In a Time of Peace – that echo each other and transpose the image of the body of a dead boy lying on a pavement from the fictional Vasenka to the US today.
‘There are layers of theatre-within-theatre in it’ … from left: Kate Finegan, Lisa Kelly, Romel Belcher, Caoimhe Coburn Gray and Eoin Gleeson in rehearsals. Photograph: Johnny Corcoran
“What is complicated is seeing these images of violence in one of the poorest countries in Europe [Ukraine] and one of the richest countries in the world,” says Kaminsky. “I realised I needed to change the genre I’m writing in. I needed a genre that speaks to both sides of my life. So the book is a kind of fairytale, it’s dream time, a fantasia. A fairytale was a necessity, to speak about both these landscapes, Ukraine and the US.”
British Sign Language is for prose, whereas Visual Vernacular is much closer to poetry
“There are layers of theatre-within-theatre in it,” Moukarzel says. “The way it is presented, with the first line ‘Our country is the stage’, the list of dramatis personae of townspeople and the puppet theatre run by the character of Momma Galya, all this adds theatricality. We were intrigued. But we wondered if it was ethical to adapt it: was it our story to tell, especially the deaf experience? That gave us pause. We needed to build the right team.”
Thankfully, the two directors have history when it comes to pushing boundaries on stage. Their show Beckett’s Room told the story of the apartment in Paris where Samuel Beckett lived with his partner Suzanne during the second world war without using any live actors.
In this production there will be an ensemble created from deaf and hearing actors, along with aerial performers, live cinema and poetry, using a mix of spoken English, British Sign Language (BSL), Irish Sign Language and creative captioning. On the day I sat in on a rehearsal, there was also a slightly out of control drone and some beautifully crafted string puppets making a tentative appearance.
‘I needed a genre that speaks to both sides of my life’ … Ilya Kaminsky. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer
Watching keenly was Zoë McWhinney, a deaf poet and actor who co-authored the script with Kidd and Moukarzel. “We gave each other a lot of freedom from the start,” McWhinney says, speaking through an interpreter. She used BSL to work on the rough script, recording herself on video. “In some ways, it is BSL-led, rather than spoken English,” she says. McWhinney also brought in Visual Vernacular (VV) – a form of performance art that draws on sign language, mime and theatre.
“BSL is for conversation, for prose, whereas VV is much closer to poetry,” says McWhinney. “There is a rhythm and pace to it. Through gesture and movement, facial expressions, hand movement, you can see the image: you’re almost personifying the language.”
For Kaminsky, it was Dead Centre’s innovative approach to adapting nonfiction that appealed to him. “The way they spoke about implicating the audience was fascinating to me. I thought, ‘I’m getting an education here, keep it coming!’ I didn’t want to see a Xerox copy of my book. It’s up to them to create their own art form; otherwise the energy gets stiff. And I want the energy to be electric.”
Deaf Republic is at Royal Court theatre, London, 29 August-13 September, then at the Samuel Beckett theatre, Dublin, 2-5 October, as part of Dublin Theatre festival
