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The Theatreguide.London Review
Tribes
Royal Court Theatre Autumn 2010
Nina Raine's
new play attempts to do at least three things at once, and while it
inevitably can't do full justice to all its themes, it will make you
think and feel about each of them in turn.
On one level, it is a study in a functional family made up of
dysfunctional individuals. On another, it's about being deaf and going
deaf, and how those are not the same experience.
And as the
title suggests, it explores the ways in which every group, from family
to friends to political movement, is a tribe with its own rituals,
values and demands of loyalty.
We are introduced first to the sort of family for whom shouting, arguing
and trading witty insults are normal and in no way unloving dinner
conversation.
Only gradually
will we discover that each member of this rather entertaining crew is
damaged or limited in some deep way. Father is an intellectual bully,
mother a blocked writer, adult daughter desperate for a man, adult son
fighting the voices in his head telling him he's worthless.
The only quiet one at the table is the second son, deaf since birth
though adept at reading lips.
In the course
of the play he will meet a girl who is going deaf, and their romance
will be threatened by the discovery that they have less in common than
might first appear, her deep distress being something he's never had to
share.
But through her he will meet the wider deaf community, and begin to
question whether there is more tying him to that tribe than to the one
he was born into.
You can see the potential power in those stories, but also the
unlikelihood of being able to squeeze them all - I've actually left out
a few sub-themes - into one short play.
So the power of Tribes lies in parts rather than the whole - in the
moments of discovery of the family members' individual pains, in our
hopes for the lovers and the way the playwright convinces us that they
must be dashed, in the scene in which the deaf lad announces that he's
switching loyalty to his new tribe and the family's inability to
comprehend this, and in the ways each of these will remain and resonate
in our thinking after the show.
Roger Michell's direction smooths over some of the seams between the
play's various pieces, though an authorial device of providing projected
surtitles for some spoken and signed dialogue proves difficult to
synchronise and integrate into the play's reality successfully.
In a uniformly strong cast Jacob Casselden and Michelle Terry as the
lovers stand out, not least for the technical accomplishment of
capturing the sound of deaf voices and frequently signing as well as
speaking.
Gerald Berkowitz
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