Two Chairs

Two Chairs
Deafinitely Theatre

Shirley Dent

I simply do not believe that the experience of meeting someone who is deaf induces spontaneous lobotomy in the majority of the adult population.

Two Chairs seems to suggest it does.

Built around the fundamentally interesting questions of 'How, what, why do we communicate with each other?', Two Chairs is set in a hospital and focuses on the growing friendship and blossoming romance between a young man and a young woman. He is deaf and she is hearing.

Talking the language of love is difficult enough when you speak the same language. If language frustrates rather than effects that communication, then what do we do? Well, we know what we do. We still communicate. We are almost defined by the need, the drive, to communicate. In any love affair, language can become a battlefield. And when the war is over, opening out or closing down that field of communication, a potentially very interesting drama is in the offing. Children of a Lesser God covered this territory not entirely successfully almost twenty years ago, with Marlee Matlin as a deaf student and William Hurt as her teacher. I liked the passion and the love story in Children of a Lesser God, but then I'm a sucker for sentimentality.

Two Chairs had the potential, if thought through properly, to do some things better than Children of a Lesser God. But this was doomed from the start for the basic reason that Two Chairs forgets that it's a drama and quickly dons the mantle of a preacher.

And the sermon from the pulpit sayeth: 'Behold here is difference and all you doh-brained insensitives out there just cannot be trusted to see or communicate beyond this by yourselves'. You think I'm being over the top? On realising that the young man she had been checking out was deaf the woman - who we presume to be an adult of reasonable intelligence - suddenly changes into a complete moron, saying 'Oh shit', talking in a ridiculously loud voice, jigging around frenetically and making Steps-like YMCA letters of the alphabet in a bid to communicate. Ask yourselves, 'Is this most people's reaction on realising that someone speaks a different language or that someone can't hear?'

Two Chairs willingly falls into the trap of suggesting difference gives moral authority per se. The Chicago Sun Times critic, Roger Ebert, raised this spectre of the "disability genre" in his review of Children of a Lesser God: 'Most of the movies in this genre seem to treat the handicap as a sort of bonus, conferring greater moral authenticity on the handicapped character. This is a form of subtle condescension'. Wise words.

When I was in Paris as a student there was a signing station in Les Halles where deaf teenagers congregated to sign. It interested me and I was curious. But not because they were deaf. It was the same interest that I had in sitting in a café and eavesdropping on the French conversations of the hearing. I was interested in figuring out what they were saying to each other, the way a different language allows people to communicate.

And this is what was interesting about Two Chairs. Between the 'Hearing people are idiots' tedium, there were signed poems. Steven Webb, whose acting ability transcended the daftness of the drama, performed these poems with dramatic intensity and grace. I was drawn in. I wanted to hear what he was saying. And that really is the point of good theatre.

But then I'm a sucker for good-looking, intense young men doing poetry too.

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