Shape Shifting the Silence

Abstract

This chapter interrogates the choices made by Amanda Coogan in collaboration with Dublin Theatre of the Deaf in the 2017 adaption of Teresa Deevy’s The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935), staged as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival at the Peacock Theatre. Produced by Lynette Morgan (Live Collision), the production – Talk Real Fine, Just Like a Lady – was an important moment in Irish performance practice in that it was designed to be equally accessible to deafened and hearing audiences. This chapter considers how directorial vision, collaborative authorship, design, and ensemble practice combine to expose the exclusions of theatre practice that prioritise spoken language. Additionally, the chapter analyses how spoken language-based texts can be transposed by gesture, image, and spatial, temporal, and sound design to become adaptations that reinvent, and destablise, the original text and simultaneously reflect on the wider socio-cultural environment from which that original text emanated.