A Twickenham theatre is striving to make their plays accessible for the hard of hearing, starting with next month’s performance of The Ghost Train.
Play director and freelance lip-speaker Asha Gill has been working to add captioning to the Mary Wallace Theatre’s productions, and will see that come to fruition at the upcoming show which is playing between 6 and 13 December.
Gill is a professional lip-speaker who supports the deaf community by working with a range of organisations such as Sky to help people with hearing loss communicate through sign language and lip-reading.
The director said: “It’s my area of expertise and my passion. Amateur theatre is my big hobby.
“It seemed really stupid that I have all these skills and the ability to make it more accessible for the deaf- and there’s no one else doing this in local theatre in south west London, really.
“And so I’d love to be able to invite my clients to come and watch my play, but they don’t have access, so that’s why I was so forceful in driving this.”
Gill described the process as “laborious”, involving altering aspects of the script to better suit the nature of a live performance, with a focus on timing, special effects, and ensuring the plot isn’t prematurely spoilt by the captions.
This time-consuming endeavour is one which happens both in advance of the production and live, with the director having to coordinate the captions on the screen to the live action happening in front of the audience.
Gill said: “It takes ages to do before the show, and then when you’re actually there, you’re sat waiting to press go for all of the lines, because you don’t want to send the captions before the person said the line.
“Otherwise, it’ll be like ‘the murderer is XYZ’ and everyone reads it before the actor who’s taking a long pause and then the half of the audience are like ‘oh, yeah.’”
Gill described implementing captions as a “battle” at times, but something which is so crucial for local theatre to ensure everyone is able to partake in the community and enjoy what people are coming together to make.
The Mary Wallace Theatre has done all the work in-house to ensure costs are kept to a minimum, and to make their goal of accessible performances a reality.
Gill said: “I have the expertise to caption, but we needed a group of people that we needed to train up, we needed access to software, we needed access to hardware, looking at grants.
“And it’s the only opportunity to caption for local theatres and community events – someone has to pay for it, right?
“But that’s why I was like ‘I want to bring this in-house so that we’re running it ourselves and it doesn’t cost us anything.’
“We don’t lose out by trying to make this more accessible.”
While the general show tickets are sold out, access seats are still available by contacting the box office.
Feature image: Richmond Shakespeare Society
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