Static

Static consists of two plays. One is performed in English, and concerns the desperate attempts of a wife and a friend to come to terms with the loss of Chris, a music journalist who had lost his hearing.

The other, performed at the same time in Sign Language, examines the grieving process of Chris's sister, who finds that his death has challenged her faith in God. While the two plays overlap and inform each other, Suspect Culture and Graeae have very deliberately created a work that will be experienced differently by hearing and non-hearing audiences.

On one level, Static is a wonderful experiment, an attempt to move the typical response to deafness from the sidelines and into the thick of the action. However, thanks to strong performances from all four cast members ' Steven Webb as Chris is benignly haunting and Jeni Draper gives his sister a confused ferocity ' Static is a sensitive portrayal of a family in torment, hinting at the possible redemption that music can bring.

As in Theatre Workshop's recent production of Endgame, the casting of disabled actors makes a simple metaphor potent and literal. Sounds ' whether they are the imagined voices that Chris' wife believes that she can hear, or the bleeding of old tracks onto a blank cassette ' become symbols of the missing and the desired. Jeni Draper's signed monologues have the intensity of dance, forcing the anger through her silence and stressing her isolation and despair.

Dan Rebellato's script deftly handles the small insanities of grief, neither swaying into melodrama nor tidying up the characters' lives with a simple finale. The compassion that flows through the work, from the opening scenes of domestic fun through to the show-stopping mime to Rufus Wainwright's anguished Agnus Dei, makes this far more than a formal attempt to include the deaf audience.

While some of the characterisation is slightly weak ' Jeni Draper's Julia has a fairly predictable bust up with God, and her behaviour makes her a stereotypical bad Christian ' the interplay between Pauline Lockhart's grieving wife Sarah and music-obsessed Martin (Tom Thomasson) entwines the play's reflective heart and its hip preoccupation with music.

The soundtrack is exceptionally well chosen ' Sonic Youth provide towering menace, and the hiss of the cassette tape is both nostalgic and affecting. Static takes on the challenges of modern theatricality, discovering a new structure and examining new ideas but without losing the populist touch.