Static

25 Feb 2008 in Dance & Drama

Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 22 February, 2008, and touring

Tom Thomasson, Steven Webb, Jeni Draper and Pauline Lockhart in rehearsal for Static. (Photo: Lizzie Malcolm).

YOU DON’T EXPECT a play about pop music to be performed in sign language. It’s easy to assume people with hearing impairments have nothing to do with the world of sound. But from the off in this play by Dan Rebellato we find the deaf actor Steven Webb teasing us with his arcane knowledge of Johnny Cash and Hall and Oates.

In this case, he’s playing a character, Chris, who has lost his hearing in a car crash, but whose enthusiasm for music – the record sleeves, the smell of vinyl, the imagined gigs that never were – remains undiminished. It reminds you that music isn’t just about sounds and that people are affected differently by hearing loss.

A collaboration between Glasgow’s Suspect Culture and London’s Graeae, Static is not so much the story of Chris as of the people who are left behind when the young man dies of a brain haemorrhage. His wife, sister and music-loving best friend are left with a sudden hole in their lives, an unsettling absence like the crackle of static on a tape that’s been wiped clean.

The only thing his wife, played by an earnest Pauline Lockhart, has left to make sense of her loss is a compilation tape he put together during his final days. Somehow, she suspects, the collection of songs will give her the answers she needs to sort out the chaos of her grief.

There are promising ideas in here, but Rebellato’s script alights on the least interesting aspect of the story. The reaction of sister and friend to Chris’s death are commonplace and the only thing to distinguish his wife’s response is her obsession with his compilation tape, a drawn out storyline culminating in a predictable guessing game.

It’s hard to know why the playwright focused on these soap opera narratives instead of the fertile ground, touched on but not explored, of what it means to be a music journalist who loses his hearing. All the intriguing stuff is in the past; the present feels like treading water, so much so that the character of the sister fades out altogether.

There are some amusing passages gently satirising those who live their lives on a song by song basis and, in a production jointly directed by Graham Eatough and Jenny Sealey, a sparky combination of speech and sign language. But none of this is enough to counteract a play that is Static in more senses that intended.

Static is at the Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, on 7-8 March 2008.
© Mark Fisher, 2008

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