Theatre

Tribes

Platform, The Bridge, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

FOUR STARS

You don’t really notice Billy at first. There’s too much noise: the sound of competitive egos battling for attention, mostly. He’s the only one at the dinner-table who’s not joining in the jousting that passes for conversation among his parents and his two twenty-something siblings. But then Billy is also the only one in this vociferous family who is deaf. His lip-reading skills are formidable, his mother has taught him to speak rather than sign but, as Nina Raine’s unflinchingly confrontational play about attitudes to deafness soon shows, the onus is always on Billy to perform as a part of a hearing world – and when he meets Sylvia, that burden comes to seem like a family denial of his true being.

This scenario, in itself, is full of chewy issues about identity and communicating but Sylvia’s incipient hearing loss adds another thought-provoking layer. Her parents were born deaf, she uses sign language with them – surely she is well equipped to cope? This strand is perhaps the most raw and provocative aspect of a funny play that refuses to be politically correct, or mealy-mouthed about the realities, and the conflicting politics, of belonging to the deaf community.

Solar Bear, a theatre company making work with deaf and hearing performers for a similarly integrated audience, seizes on Tribes with an unstinting honesty and gleeful humour that is almost unnerving. A powerful cast, directed by Gerry Ramage, successfully skirts the cliches of family dysfunction that creep into Raine’s plotting – Billy’s kin all seem afflicted by disabling insecurities and emotional problems – with outstanding performances by Alex Nowak (Billy) and Stephanie McGregor (Sylvia) drawing us ever deeper into a debate that has no easy answers.