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Two
Chairs
By
Shirley Dent
I
simply do not believe that the experience of meeting
someone who is deaf induces spontaneous lobotomy in
the majority of the adult population.
Two
Chairs seems to suggest it does. Built around the fundamentally
interesting questions of 'How, what, why do we communicate
with each other?', Two Chairs is set in a hospital and
focuses on the growing friendship and blossoming romance
between a young man and a young woman. He is deaf and
she is hearing.
Talking
the language of love is difficult enough when you speak
the same language. If language frustrates rather than
effects that communication, then what do we do? Well,
we know what we do. We still communicate. We are almost
defined by the need, the drive, to communicate. In any
love affair, language can become a battlefield. And
when the war is over, opening out or closing down that
field of communication, a potentially very interesting
drama is in the offing. Children
of a Lesser God
covered this territory not entirely successfully
almost twenty years ago, with Marlee Matlin as a deaf
student and William Hurt as her teacher. I liked the
passion and the love story in Children of a Lesser God,
but then I'm a sucker for sentimentality.
Two Chairs had the potential, if thought through properly,
to do some things better than Children of a Lesser God.
But this was doomed from the start for the basic reason
that Two Chairs forgets that it's a drama and quickly
dons the mantle of a preacher.
And
the sermon from the pulpit sayeth: 'Behold here is difference
and all you doh-brained insensitive out there just cannot
be trusted to see or communicate beyond this by yourselves'.
You think I'm being over the top? On realising that
the young man she had been checking out was deaf the
woman - who we presume to be an adult of reasonable
intelligence - suddenly changes into a complete moron,
saying 'Oh shit', talking in a ridiculously loud voice,
jigging around frenetically and making Steps-like YMCA
letters of the alphabet in a bid to communicate. Ask
yourselves, 'Is this most people's reaction on realising
that someone speaks a different language or that someone
can't hear?' Two Chairs willingly falls into the trap
of suggesting difference gives moral authority per se.
The Chicago Sun Times critic, Roger Ebert, raised this
spectre of the "disability genre" in his review of Children
of a Lesser God: 'Most of the movies in this genre seem
to treat the handicap as a sort of bonus, conferring
greater moral authenticity on the handicapped character.
This is a form of subtle condescension'. Wise words.
When
I was in Paris as a student there was a signing station
in Les Halles where deaf teenagers congregated to sign.
It interested me and I was curious. But not because
they were deaf. It was the same interest that I had
in sitting in a café and eavesdropping on the French
conversations of the hearing. I was interested in figuring
out what they were saying to each other, the way a different
language allows people to communicate.
And this is what was interesting about Two Chairs. Between
the 'Hearing people are idiots' tedium, there were signed
poems. Steven Webb, whose acting ability transcended
the daftness of the drama, performed these poems with
dramatic intensity and grace. I was drawn in. I wanted
to hear what he was saying. And that really is the point
of good theatre. But then I'm a sucker for good-looking,
intense young men doing poetry too.
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