Synopsis "I just thought that everyone’s parents spoke like that. Then I realised. Just like I thought everyone’s parents walked around in the nude shouting at each other. They do" Billy's fiercely intelligent and proudly unconventional family are their own tiny empire, with their own private language, jokes and rules. You can be as rude as you like, as possessive as you like, as critical as you like. Arguments are an expression of love. After all, you'd do anything for each other - wouldn't you? But Billy, who is deaf, is one of the few who actually listens. Meeting Sylvia makes him finally want to be heard; can he get a word in edgeways? Age guidance 14+ Downstairs
Harry Treadaway, Kika Markham & Jacob Casseld in Tribes
Date: 22 October 2010
Following the success of her debut play Rabbit, Nina Raine's Tribes opened at the Royal Court on 20 October 2010 (previews from 14 October) where it continues until 13 November.
"It is 30 years since Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God brought deafness to the stage in an unusual love story; now Nina Raine writes a much edgier, and more blistering, domestic drama ... Tribes certainly sits well with artistic director Dominic Cooke's avowed policy of foregrounding middle-class issues and raising taboo subjects ... Having subtly established the parameters of a debate about language – you never feel she’s being gratuitously diagrammatic – Raine introduces Billy’s friend, the catalytic Sylvia, brilliantly played by Michelle Terry, who is going slowly deaf and half speaking in sign language ... The play is cleverly designed by Mark Thompson and beautifully lit by Rick Fisher, and settles around the developing relationship between Billy (touchingly played by deaf actor Jacob Casselden) and Sylvia ... There are other loose ends, but the overwhelming impact of a highly original and cunningly written new play, superb acting all round ... all ensure another stimulating evening in Sloane Square."
"Nina Raine's promising first play, Rabbit, dealt with sexual politics. Now she steps up a gear with a more challenging play about isolation, deafness, families and the confusion of articulacy with emotional literacy. Even if it veers towards a dubiously upbeat ending, it is a lively, provocative piece that offers precious insights ... The crisis comes when Billy falls for Sylvia, who is going deaf. ... Raine is good on the collision of two worlds and has many sharp, unsentimental things to say about tribes ... Admittedly... she saddles Billy's siblings with too many problems ... But the play's defects are overcome by its questing curiosity ... Jacob Casselden as the independence-seeking Billy, Michelle Terry as the troubled Sylvia torn between the hearing and the deaf and Stanley Townsend as the bumptiously offensive father are especially good. The last poses the play's central question when he aggressively asks Sylvia, a propos sign-language: 'How can you feel a feeling unless you have the word for it?' Raine's play provides an answer by implying that excessive verbalisation can become a disability."
"I confess that I wasn’t a fan of Rabbit, struggling as I did with its over-arch dialogue. The lengthy gap between plays one and two has seen Raine’s writing mature wonderfully, as the exchanges here are razor-sharp as well as utterly credible ... Initially it seems as though we’re sitting around the dining table of a classic over-achieving, cultured modern family ... The picture is clouded by deaf youngest son Billy (Jacob Casselden). The only time everyone stops interrupting each other is to listen with condescension when he speaks ... Raine has useful points to make about talking not being the same as actually saying anything ... Does the label “deaf” signal a disability “ghetto” or a place of free expression? Roger Michell directs with judicious periods of silence, and there are fine performances ... Raine, thankfully, isn’t going to make us wait so long: there’s more from her at Hampstead in January."
"At once funny and piercingly painful ... To restrict it to a ghetto of “disability theatre” would be gravely to undervalue its scope ... Raine... writes with a marvellous mixture of wit and empathy. And in Roger Michell’s beautifully judged, superbly acted production, you come to know all the characters in depth. There are also mesmerising passages involving signing, with the words, so eloquently expressed by gesture, also appearing as surtitles ... Jacob Casselden, who is deaf himself, is the still centre of the family storm as Billy, and the sense of wonder with which he falls in love and discovers a new confidence is as moving as anything I have seen in the theatre this year. Michelle Terry is equally beguiling as his girlfriend ... There is outstanding support from Stanley Townsend as the booming, disputatious father, Kika Markham as the loving, grief-stricken mother and Harry Treadaway and Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Billy’s hearing siblings, both afflicted by problems and insecurities of their own."
"Playwright Nina Raine needs to wash her mouth out. She has written an unusual, in places touching play about family love and the exclusion of deaf people. It could be a commercial hit, worthy of transfer to the West End, maybe even the small screen, but for one problem: her adolescent, demeaning, depressing, self-defeating glee in foul language ... Miss Raine uses bad language so promiscuously that the words lose their potency and simply become litter ... You expect better from a daughter of intellectual privilege (her father Craig Raine is a poet who taught English at Oxford) ... Miss Raine gives this controversy a skilful chewing-over and is well served by a cast which includes Stanley Townsend as the father and Kika Markham as the mother ... Some moments are confusing. Billy’s behaviour is not always explained and some business about his brother hearing strange voices doesn’t make much sense. But there is a lovely finale which will have you snuffling. If they could only reduce the profanities by 95%, I would recommend this show in a shot."
"Tribes, a fiercely intelligent, caustically funny and emotionally wrenching piece about communication, belonging, and identity ... There's both a witty and a heartbreaking candour in Terry's sensitive portrayal as we see when Sylvia flutteringly demonstrates the expressive beauty of sign language by translating a passage from Paradise Lost ... Tribes unfolds in a dramatically incisive mix of speech and sign language, the latter projected in words on an upstage gauze. Most piercing, though, are those moments of surtitled silence, as in the gestures of love between Billy and his mentally troubled brother that bring home the eloquence of what is left unsaid. These give the lie to the father's smugly aggressive scepticism ("how can you feel a feeling unless you have a word for it?") and tacitly establish that it's hyper-articulacy that can sometimes be the real handicap."
Dominic Maxwell The Times ★★★★
"Nina Raine is a playwright to watch. Tribes is a play about belonging, about deafness, about finding your voice. And, for its polyphonic first half at least, it’s about as sharp, witty and stimulating as a domestic drama can be. Roger Michell’s deft production gives us a well-off, liberal family to believe in ... Raine has found everyone’s voice here ... As Sylvia, Michelle Terry gets across the nerves, politeness, defiance and confusion of a woman suddenly caught in a personal and political pincer movement ... The plottier second half can’t quite live up to that. It’s still good writing — but it feels like good writing, with some of the contrivances that one allows for in plays, where the first half felt uncannily like life, concentrated but real . A subplot about Billy’s new career as a lip-reader is overkill. Raine’s empathy with her characters remains vivid throughout, though. She suggests what it’s like to go deaf, the hang-ups and the hierarchies. But also how the hearing can disable themselves with the sound of their own voices. A fresh, funny and affecting evening."
It is 30 years since Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God brought deafness to the stage in an unusual love story; now Nina Raine writes a much edgier, and more blistering, domestic drama in which a deaf younger son, Billy, recently graduated, reassesses his relationship to his own family after meeting someone who listens to him more than they do.
Tribes certainly sits well with artistic director Dominic Cooke’s avowed policy of foregrounding middle-class issues and raising taboo subjects. Billy’s family is a nightmare collection of egotists, similar to Noel Coward’s self-absorbed Bliss family in Hay Fever.
Christopher (Stanley Townsend) is a loudmouth academic, full of racist jokes and put-downs, while his wife Beth (Kika Markham) is trying to finish a novel. This is a family who shout without listening, speak without feeling; Roger Michell’s production has an ironically high decibel level, for the first half-hour at least.
Billy’s siblings Daniel (Harry Treadaway) and Ruth (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) are, respectively, engaged on a thesis about the inadequacy of language and the transcendental power of music; Ruth is an aspiring opera singer.
Having subtly established the parameters of a debate about language – you never feel she’s being gratuitously diagrammatic – Raine introduces Billy’s friend, the catalytic Sylvia, brilliantly played by Michelle Terry, who is going slowly deaf and half speaking in sign language: she also recalls how to play Debussy on the piano.
The play is cleverly designed by Mark Thompson and beautifully lit by Rick Fisher, and settles around the developing relationship between Billy (touchingly played by deaf actor Jacob Casselden) and Sylvia, and the broken communication cord results in a vociferous showdown, complicated by an enigmatically puzzling court case involving Billy.
There are other loose ends, but the overwhelming impact of a highly original and cunningly written new play, superb acting all round, with Puccini’s “Humming Chorus” (no words) sealing some kind of reunion, all ensure another stimulating evening in Sloane Square.
The first scene hadn’t been playing for long by before I took a profound dislike to four of the five characters. Here was an introspective family of self-possessed ‘Bohemians’ with their inclusive behavioural norms and language (much of it implausibly filthy – I don’t know any 20-somethings who’d speak like that in front of and to their parents!). I’ve spent time with families like this (well, without the language) and they exclude others even without meaning to. They brought up youngest son Billy to lip-read rather than sign, thinking this was including him. The result was his exclusion from the outer deaf world and without them realising it, from their world too. Billy, deaf from birth, meets a girl who is going deaf and enters her world and the wider deaf world, learning to sign (to the anger of his family) in order to do so. When he brings her home, the family reaction is a bit curious, a bit bemused, very patronising and somewhat resistant to this invasion from the other world. Eventually Billy asserts himself and withdraws, much to their disbelief.
I was convinced after the first few minutes I wasn’t going to like this play; how can you spend two hours with these horrible people and enjoy it? However, it developed such complexity and depth that I became enthralled; I even woke up this morning thinking about it. It says so much about communication but in a way which plants ideas and expects you to process them yourself. Roger Mitchell’s sensitive production gets an intimacy from Mark Thompson’s set which seems to reduce the size of the auditorium and draw you towards the stage. The performances are excellent, with Harry Treadaway’s difficult and complex journey particularly impressive. There’s an extent to which Jacob Casselden and Michelle Terry as the deaf couple are given your empathy from the outset, but earn your understanding, respect and compassion. I missed Nina Raine’s first play Rabbit, but I was hugely impressed by this second one. Jerusalem, Enron, Cock, Posh, Sucker Punch, Clybourne Park, Tribes……The Royal Court really is on a roll. - Gareth James
The first theatre opened as The New Chelsea on 16 Apr 1870. Changed name to Belgravia. Re-opened as Royal Court 25 Jan 1871. Demolished in 1887. New theatre opened (current, slightly different site) 24 Sep 1888. Famous for supporting and commissioning new writing. Probably the first UK Theatre to regularly include their URL in advertising. Member of the Society of London Theatre. In 1996 the theatre closed for redevelopment, funded by the National Lottery. The refurbished theatre at Sloane Square re-opened in February 2000 including two theatres the 389 seat Jerwood Theatre Downstairs and the studio style Jerwood Theatre Upstairs.
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