‘A marvel of a show’

Royal Court Theatre

A town turns deaf overnight after a deaf boy is shot dead by a soldier. What follows in Dead Centre’s adaptation of a long poem by Ukrainian writer Ilya Kaminsky, mixes a show-within-a-show, puppetry, projections, and more, in a dizzying spectacle that looks at the nature of both war and theatre. It is written and directed by Dead Centre’s Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel in collaboration with BSL poet Zoë McWhinney.

[Links to full reviews are included but a number are behind paywalls and therefore may not be accessible]

5 stars ⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑

‘This is capital-T theatre: every moment of it thrills’ said Holly O’Mahony for LondonTheatre. She detailed many of those thrills in her review, ending: ‘It’s a brilliant showcase of what theatre can do, and a beautiful story of resilience, performed with spectacular creativity.’

Katie Kirkpatrick for BroadwayWorld agreed: ‘Deaf Republic is a marvel of a show. Using puppetry, live video, aerial, and a combination of spoken English, BSL, and captions, this is the kind of theatre that steps not only out of the box but into a whole new world.’ She explained; ‘It’s a visual spectacle, sure, but behind every gasp-worthy moment lie smart, prescient ideas. Parallels are drawn between sign language, poetry, and theatre, illustrating the amount of thought that has gone into the adaptation process.’

4 stars ⭑⭑⭑⭑

The Independent‘s Alice Saville declared it to be ‘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’. She concluded: ‘Deaf Republic is a slippery thing… 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.’

Time Out‘s Andrzej  Lukowksi told us: ‘Dublin’s Dead Centre is a true marvel, a theatre company that makes intensely visceral works that feel like they’ve been wrenched from a beautiful dream and a screaming nightmare simultaneously.’ He described some of the details: ‘Kevin Gleeson’s droning sound design is gorgeous and primal. The interplay of Grant Gee’s dreamy video work and the gauzy scrims that descend from the ceiling is beautiful and disorientating. Jeremy Herbert’s set includes a full-sized car, which is just very cool.’

Dave Fargnoli reported for The Stage: ‘the piece plays, sometimes dizzyingly, with ideas of language, empathy, agency and resistance. The playful, metatheatrical text is delivered in a blend of British Sign Language, spoken lines, and surtitles. Moukarzel and Kidd’s lucid, confident direction holds the many threads together, employing video segments, live footage and some cheekily subversive puppetry, each new layer intentionally highlighting the artificiality of live performance.’

The Financial Times’ Sarah Hemming found ‘the sign language that runs through Kaminsky’s original takes on living form as an ensemble of deaf and hearing actors act out the story, buzzing between sign languages, surtitles, film and spoken dialogue. And language is just one strand of a richly textured, shape-shifting piece (directed by co-writers Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel) that draws on age-old theatrical tools of resistance — allegory, irony, puppetry — to add nuance and depth and, most significantly, to switch perspective.’ She vividly explained: ‘Perhaps most potently, Deaf Republic foregrounds the act of translation at the heart of all theatre: that this is manifestly not real, and yet it can express a reality that we struggle to articulate.’

Claire Allfree in the Telegraph called it ‘a wondrous two hours of storytelling’.

Chris Omaweng of LondonTheatre1 noted: ‘Some intriguing ideas are introduced in a visually impressive and marvellously unsettling production.’

3 stars ⭑⭑⭑

For Theo Bosanquet at WhatsOnStage: ‘It suffers somewhat from over-ambition, as it struggles to tie its disparate ideas together.’ However, ‘there’s a dystopian darkness underscoring it that leaves a lasting impression, and the fact it ends with a joke, told by the soldier, is as bleak a coda as one could imagine.’

David Jays for The Guardian described how ‘signing impels the show: a vivid choreography of communication. Signing, speech and surtitles are variously combined; panic and violence are loud in every register.’ He observed: ‘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.’

The Times‘  Clive Davis had reservations. He acknowledged that the writers ‘have conjured up hallucinogenic tableaux, combining puppetry with video close-ups and a sliver of circus theatrics which demonstrate how easily everyday life can slip into random bloodshed.’ But he felt ‘At times, Deaf Republic has more of the static quality of an art installation.’

Critics’ Average Rating 3.9⭑

Deaf Republic can be seen at the Royal Court Theatre until 13 September 2025. Buy tickets directly from the theatre

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