4 hours ago
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‘There are other ways to listen,” says Joe (Jamie Rea) to his new friend Andy (Dylan Wood), a busker he has discovered on the street and invited home for a drink. He takes off his shoes, the better to feel the vibrations through the floor, and straps on a gadget called a Subpac. He gets Andy to lean his full height against a towering speaker stack. Only then does the rumbling bass kick in.
Little, perhaps, to distinguish them from two drum’n’bass enthusiasts, but this is something else. Joe is less singer than signer, a BSL speaker whose disability has been no impediment to his love of music. He tells an incredulous Andy that he appreciates sound by feeling it and puts his hand on the musician’s acoustic guitar to demonstrate. They form the least likely of songwriting partnerships.
Staged by Cora Bissett, who made a 20-minute film of the same name with Rea, The Singer is gig theatre with a difference. Midway through, the house lights come up and they teach us how to sign the chorus of Find My Feet, the kind of feelgood morale booster you can imagine on the soundtrack of a children’s movie. We all delightedly join in. The song is written by KT Tunstall, whose indie folk rock score lends an authentic edge to the story, complemented by Joe’s beats, under the musical direction of Michael John McCarthy.
That story, also written by Bissett, is not the production’s chief strength. Staged by Dundee Rep and Solar Bear, it is a simple tale of a tested friendship in an exploitative music industry. But as Andy goes from faithful to fickle and back again, it finds room to make salient points about the exclusion of d/Deaf people and the lower status accorded to BSL culture.
It wears its politics lightly but unmistakably on a set by designer Jenny Booth that ensures written, spoken and signed languages are always available. Adding a ribald running commentary are Hannah Jarrett-Scott and Peter Dobre as Andy’s can-do grandparents, an excellent Jarrett-Scott giving Tunstall’s songs a soulful boost alongside Wood’s earthy singer-songwriter vibes. Whatever your language, it is a highly enjoyable show.
