Wordless wonders
Lloyd Evans Playing God Soho The Family Hackney Empire The Agent Trafalgar Studio Astrange night at the Soho. Before curtain-up the place was crowded with people excitedly conversing with each other yet there was practically no noise. They were deaf. Signed conversation requires full and constant eye contact, which makes it more intense, intimate and animated than our conversation, and as I watched the deaf exchanging their artful, fascinating handdances I felt an enormous pang of envy. What a club to belong to! And this turned out to be the theme of the play. John and Alison, both deaf, have a daughter who needs a mechanical implant to improve her hearing. Alison is keen but John fears that the doctors are plotting to ruin his family. As the child's hearing improves she'll lose interest in signing and will effectively be stolen from her parents by the forces of 'normality'. An unusual and challenging theme: a loving father determined to protect his child's disability. Matthew Gurney is riveting as the tormented dad and in his magnificent climactic speech he rounds on the tinkering paediatrician and yells at him that 'signing is natural!'. Only he doesn't yell. He's mute and only his gestures and the tigerish tilt of his shoulders carry the force of his rage. This is the play's finest moment. Elsewhere it suffers from a lack of technical guile and occasionally it feels like an illustrated lecture, but the audience loved it and showed their appreciation at the end. How do the deaf clap? By holding up their hands and wiggling them.
At the Hackney Empire another wordless night A mime troupe calling themselves the 'world-famous Teatr Licedei' have arrived in London 'direct from St Petersburg', although if they were that famous someone would have asked them to stop on the way. The show starts with a pregnant mum, a brood of four kids and a drunken father dozing in a chair. It's funny. Everyone wears whiteface and mad wigs and their well-drilled zaniness comes across beautifully. But without speech how could they tell a story? My fears were groundless. There was no story, just a sequence of madcap sketches adorned with a few highly inventive visual effects. It's amusing and warm-hearted and yet I felt the entertainers were having more fun than the entertained. They relied heavily on fooling around with the audience and at one point they ran through the stalls clobbering us on the head with pillows. 'Suitable for eight yrs plus' says the poster. Not quite. Seven is the max, so flip your brain into retard mode, sit back and enjoy it.
The Agent by Martin Wagner is a twohander about a hot-shot literary promoter and a struggling novelist. The novelist feels pretty familiar: depressed, needy and not half as talented as he'd like to be, he shows up at the agent's office to discuss his new masterpiece, Black, a 350-page volume set in the mining community. The agent hates it. 'All that mining,' he shrugs. 'They're miners,' says the novelist, 'mining's what they do.' Bemused by his lack of success, he bleats pathetically about his pinched and uncertain existence. At one point he announces his intention to quit writing altogether, evidently expecting the agent to fall to his knees in tears and beg him to reconsider. All the agent does is beg him to find a new agent. Then a twist. The novelist produces a series of compromising photographs and threatens to ruin the agent's life unless he immediately sets about promoting Black. Cornered, the agent starts an auction between `the big five' publishers for a book he has just dismissed as a 120,000-word sleeping draught. The following scenes are both gripping and thoroughly authentic, and they dramatise the unsettling truth that creating bestsellers has nothing to do with nurturing literary merit — it's about strapping two rocket boosters full of hype to a book and pressing Ignition. Though the play is neatly paced and well observed, it still feels a little threadbare. At just 70 minutes there's scant room for the characters to develop or to step beyond the boundaries of the predictable. The final twist leaves the story suspended rather than concluded. Certainly Wagner has lighted on a promising theme: the agent/writer partnership is founded on shifting terrain. The writer, nominally, employs the agent but the relationship always feels the other way round — at least until the writer becomes successful. But the script doesn't quite skewer this topsy-turvy symbiosis, so here's how it really works. Before you're established they don't need you. After you're established you don't need them.
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