Theatre
Children of a Lesser God
Blue Box, M Space, Msida

We often forget, caught up as we are in our own little worlds, our own small dramas and views on life, that there are other worlds, other lives being lived and other perceptions to be taken into account.

What hearing people tend to ignore is that while we consider the deaf to be missing one of the senses we so take for granted, they also happen to have developed a whole array of sense perceptions which escape hearing people because we are lazy enough to rely completely on what we have always known. But so do the deaf – and they make sense of the world in an infinitely subtler manner which is highly sophisticated in its organisation of human expression and physical emotional cues.

Theatrencore took on Mark Medoff’s very complex 1980 script based on the relationship between a profoundly deaf young woman and her speech therapist, which develops into a romantic and ultimately marital one.

Staged last weekend, Children of a Lesser God proved to be Tyrone Grima’s directorial battle horse.

Charles Sammut played James Leeds, the enthusiastic speech therapist who is encouraged by the head of the college for the deaf, Mr Franklin (Renato Dimech) to take on a new and difficult student, Sarah Norman, played brilliantly by a completely silent Sharon Bezzina, for whom the production served as a showcase of how talented and expressive an actress she is – with lines written to be signed and interpreted physically, while maintaining a complex range of emotions.

Sammut, in turn, provided the hearing-enabled James with the right kind of attitude and strength of character to take on Sarah, although I found his characterisation to be perhaps a bit too eager at certain points.

He did, however, create a genuine escalation of emotional tension ranging from his patience with helping Sarah adapt to her new life as his deaf wife who refuses to learn to lip-read or speak, acting as her interpreter and aide, to his frustration at her stubborn stance against the hearing world and rebellion against a system which expects her to communicate verbally.

This is the sad reality which the couple face – from gossip about their teacher-student relationship going beyond the norm, by all people at the college, both hearing and deaf, to their own realisation that it is not a bed of roses when there are some fundamentally dividing factors in their relationship which only love and extreme selflessness can overcome.

Sarah and James’s past demons are gradually revealed – especially their damaged relationships with their parents: with Sarah’s father abandoning her family after she left for the school for the deaf at the age of five, to James’s mother’s suicide and their difficulty relating to their remaining parents.

It was indeed a pity that there were not any further performances of such an engaging and well-crafted play

Monica Attard’s Mrs Norman, as Sarah’s mother, starts off detached and later mends her relationship with her daughter in a short but strong performance balancing the terseness of her temper with her desire for reconciliation.

Meanwhile, Joseph Zammit as Orin Dennis and Mariella Muscat as Lydia played two fellow hard of hearing college alumni whose different attitudes to James and Sarah’s marriage and the way their domestic life revolves gives the audience a clear indication that just like anybody else, the deaf are equally prone to fits of flirtation, jealousy, annoyance and defiance.

Muscat’s Lydia provided some needed comic relief with her cheeky flirting and her malfunctioning hearing aid, while Zammit’s angst-ridden Orin convinces Sarah to take the college to court over discrimination for not allowing deaf adults with the proper training, to become tutors.

Lawyer Edna Klein (Alexandra Camilleri Warne) steps in to help but her insensitivity and lack of knowledge about the deaf, serves as an example of how lay people have very little concept of what it means to live life in another dimension devoid of sound.

Compounding the court case and her reliance on James with the rest of their simmering unresolved issues, Sarah pushes James to the limits of his patience.

He begins to realise that there are fundamental differences which they both need to grapple with if they are to move forward as a couple.

From poignancy to obstinacy, violence to humour, Children of a Lesser God reminds the audience that we all move to the beat of different drums and that the rhythms of our lives are not always easy to synch. It was clear that the cast put plenty of effort into learning how to sign thanks to speech- language coach Dorianne Callus, as well as articulating their words differently to reflect the oral production capacity of hearing-impaired learners.

Adrian Mamo’s simple and clever set design of transparent glass panels to reflect the often hidden divide between those who hear and those who do not, helped complement the strength of the piece.

It was indeed a pity that there were not any further performances of such an engaging and well-crafted play.