Originally published on Disability Arts Online, 4 February 2014

Even though it’s a work-in-progress, Stephen Collins’ delivery of his monologue is nevertheless mesmerising. He’s picked a childhood story retold by the character Baby in Jez Butterworth’s Mojo for Deafinitely Theatre’s forthcoming HUB showcase in late February, and Andrew has asked him and Donna Mullings – who has selected a monologue from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard – to demonstrate to us writers how they would translate English scripts into BSL.

In both cases, I can see how pace, tone, rhythm, and context can shift in the transition. It’s not just that certain words, sometimes entire phrases, have to be abandoned in order to convey the message in BSL more effectively; the actor also has to consider a change of emphasis so to balance out the delivery appropriately and in accordance with the prevailing mood.

It’s not a premise I’m completely unfamiliar with, of course, having delivered BSL gallery talks that contained art theories steeped in spoken-language culture. The difference with theatrical monologues, of course, is that they are essentially the character’s inner thoughts, and therefore tend to spring from an English-literary mind.

It’s something I have given much consideration to since Day 2 of the HUB scriptwriting programme, when we began sharing our first draft monologues with each other. I can’t speak for the other three, but I was certainly nervous about showing mine (yes, I know – a first draft). Feedback was thankfully good, with Andrew calling it ‘poetic’, and a nice discussion around how I could maintain the ambiguity of my drowning theme to the end.

One of the draft monologues – written by fellow HUB writer Sannah Gulamani – was very interesting. At this stage I’m not at liberty to say what it was about, but I know most people who saw it would concur that it was stunningly written and read like a book, rather than a piece of theatre. Its descriptions were certainly evocative but, funnily enough, the pictures they conjured up in my mind were those of an English speaker, not a BSL user.

In fact I got the overwhelming sense that this was the beginning of the play, rather than the middle of it; the setting of the scene, if you like. So a lively brainstorming chat ensued where we all threw in a variety of ideas as to how Sannah could further dramatize her monologue; a Shakespearean singing narrator, getting another family member to deliver the monologue (it was set earlier on in the 20th century), swapping around bits here and there…

This particular workshop actually took place over two days, so that two of us (there are four of us altogether) got to show our monologues on each day. This naturally incurred a substantial amount of thinking that generated its own motivation for the next scriptwriting workshop – our third – which took place a fortnight later.