Guest Post: 'It's Told In A Completely Different Language': Deafinitely Theatre’s Artistic Director, Paula Garfield, On Staging Mike Bartlett's BULL

I first worked with Mike Bartlett’s writing nearly ten years ago, when Deafinitely Theatre adapted Contractions into British Sign Language in 2017. I was fascinated by the power games in the play – who has status, who doesn’t and how quickly that power can be abused.

Now I’m back in a rehearsal room with another Mike Bartlett play, BULL, and I’m thinking about power and language all over again.

When I read a play, I am always thinking visually. What happens if I take the words off the page and put them into the hands, faces and bodies of deaf actors? How can British Sign Language bring something different to the story?

BULL is a very clever, very cruel play. Three colleagues are competing for two jobs and almost immediately, two of them begin circling the third. So much of the bullying is in the language; the interruptions, jokes and tiny digs that gradually become something much nastier. When you take away the spoken English and translate that into British Sign Language, where does all that cruelty go?

That is what I find so exciting about adapting existing plays into BSL. It isn’t only a case of replacing an English word with a sign. BSL is a language in its own right, with its own culture, grammar, structure and rhythm and it is incredibly visual.

Suddenly we are looking at how somebody occupies a space. How close they stand to another person. Where they look. Their facial expression. The speed and size of their signing. The way one character can physically dominate another. With BULL, all of those choices matter because the balance of power is constantly shifting.

We have to go back to the text and investigate what is underneath it. Is something a joke, or is it an attack disguised as a joke? Who has control of the conversation? When does teasing become bullying? We are not trying to change Mike’s play. We are trying to understand it deeply enough to draw out the BSL.

Mike has always been incredibly supportive of Deafinitely and our approach to his work. With Contractions, we made the Manager character deaf because I wanted to challenge the expectation that the deaf character would automatically be the person with less power. It feels very special to return to his writing with BULL.

There is another language we have been exploring too: captions.

BULL is performed entirely in BSL, but you don't need to know BSL to follow the play. We use creative captions throughout the production, built into the world of the show rather than sitting in a traditional caption box at the side of the stage. They become part of the design and the visual experience of watching BULL.

Sometimes people hear that a production is entirely in BSL and worry that it isn't for them, or that they won't understand it. But I don't think it is so different from going to the opera or seeing a play in another language and following the subtitles. You quickly become used to watching the performers and taking in the translation alongside them.

It is important that we don't think of Deafinitely simply as an “accessible theatre company”. We are making exciting work and BSL is the language in which we make it. The captions, the BSL, the performances and the design are all part of the same theatrical world.

I founded Deafinitely Theatre because I wanted BSL to be a primary language on our stages and for deaf and hearing audiences to experience our work together.

So, if you have never seen a Deafinitely Theatre production before, come and experience BULL. Don't be put off because you don't know BSL. Come and see how the play feels when it is told in a completely different language.

Whether you already know BULL, or if this is your first encounter with the play, I hope you leave having seen it – and theatre itself – a little differently.

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