The bold language of not talking

Jane Cornwell
The Australian
January 30, 2012 12:00AM

FOR someone who writes plays about family dysfunction and knotted relationships, about workplace stress and the modern malaise, Nina Raine is surprisingly reserved in the flesh.

Photo: British playwright Nina Raine, at the Hampstead theatre in London, focuses on the nature of communication and deafness in her play Tribes. Picture: Richard Pohle, The Times.

Sipping hot chocolate in a central London cafe, her face framed by wisps of blonde hair, she hesitates for a few moments before answering my questions in her cut-glass English accent. Given the profanities that pepper her work -- not to mention the fact her latest drama features a testicle removal operation in its first few minutes -- such reticence would seem to mask hidden depths.

Newly armed with January sale-type shopping bags, Raine has left the home she shares in south London's Denmark Hill with her younger playwright brother, Moses, and come into town to discuss Tribes, her hugely acclaimed second play.

Tribes follows a deaf character, Billy, who introduces his partially deaf girlfriend, Sylvia, into his unconventional and overwrought middle-class Jewish family. Billy was raised as a hearing person; learning sign language from Sylvia opens up a whole new and empowering world, and sends his tight-knit clan into a tailspin.

A musing on the nature of language and communication, on isolation and belonging and on the nature of deafness itself, Tribes premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2010, earning Raine a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best New Play in the process.

With productions gearing up for runs in Germany, New York and Hungary (from where she's recently returned), Tribes opens at the Melbourne Theatre Company's 500-seat Sumner Theatre next month with a six-strong cast including Alison Bell, Brian Lipson and Luke Watts and with direction by Julian Meyrick.

"I had no say in the casting," Raine says carefully. "But bizarrely, Alison Bell was also in Rabbit when it played at the Sydney Theatre Company. I bumped into her in London last year; I wonder if she then saw Tribes and had something to do with this."

Rabbit -- Raine's smash-hit debut about sexual politics -- enjoyed a Sydney run in 2008 after catching the eye of the STC's then-artistic director Robin Nevin (who now is part of the MTC's 2012 programming team).

Raine travelled to Australia to direct the play, just as she'd directed the original British cast in a room above the Old Red Lion pub in Islington, and again on its transfer to Whitehall's more salubrious Trafalgar Studios.

Rabbit went on to feature in the Brits Off Broadway season in New York, and brought her a pound stg. 30,000 London Evening Standard Award for most promising playwright. She used the prizemoney for the deposit on her flat.

"Awards make a real difference in the beginning," says Raine, the daughter of a poet father (the famously fearless Craig Raine) and literary academic mother (Ann Pasternak Slater) who began directing plays while studying English at Oxford University, then started writing them while working as an assistant director to visionaries such as Stephen Daldry, Nicholas Hytner and Katie Mitchell.

"It took me three years to find a home for Rabbit, and I finally had to put it on in a pub theatre." A quick smile. "So the validation, when it came, was immense."

Raine spent a few years writing TV scripts and directing other people's plays before returning to the stage with two new works: Tribes and Tiger Country. The latter, a hugely acclaimed fast-paced examination of life at a busy London hospital (testicular surgery and all), was commissioned by the Hampstead Theatre and directed (and painstakingly researched) by Raine. "It was me trying to show the doctors' point of view, saying 'This is what it's like from the other side'."

Tribes was directed by the British film and theatre veteran Roger Mitchell.

"It was like watching a master at work, purloining a few tricks for my own bag," she told Britain's Independent newspaper. "I felt gloriously responsibility-free."

A tough act to follow, perhaps, for Meyrick -- a director and theatre historian whom Raine has met just this morning via Skype: "There he was, slightly pixellated on my computer, asking me very sensitive and intelligent questions. He seemed to want to use what I had to say, which was great. You never know what you're going to get with a director."

She pauses for a few beats. "The European attitude is that the writer is kind of irrelevant. In Hungary I said to the director 'In this scene one character falls in love with another character', and he said, 'No, he doesn't. I don't see any evidence of this'."

She shakes her head. "But they did have some brilliant actors," she adds, laughing. "They got a hearing person to play the deaf boy, which I was terrified to do in England; it seems very politically incorrect. Deaf actors are within their rights to say, 'If you don't cast us as a deaf person then when are we going to get cast?' " (For the record, Watts happens to be deaf.)

Variously hailed as smart, fierce, funny and moving, Tribes controversially asserts that the "deaf community" has its own rituals and hierarchies (being born deaf has more kudos than turning deaf later in life, say), and its own set of rules. Raine started writing the play after watching a documentary about a deaf couple who were about to have their first baby, and expressed a hope that the child would be deaf.

"I was struck by the thought that this was actually what many people feel, deaf or otherwise," she says. "Parents take great pleasure in witnessing the qualities they have passed on to their children. A set of values, beliefs; even a particular language."

Tribes blends spare, sinewy and frequently foul-mouthed speech with sign language, some of which Raine learned as part of her research into Britain's small and hierarchical deaf community.

"I found signing incredibly tiring. I don't do anything that uses whatever side of the brain it is that does pottery, Lego or surgery; I felt like I was being made to assume a personality that didn't fit me."

For someone who by her own admission dislikes confrontation, who is ever so slightly neurotic, Raine felt constantly tested. "The thing about signing is that you really have to maintain eye contact or it's considered quite rude. Signing demands that you do things like mime a steering wheel if you're talking about driving, or stroke your neck upwards and make a face like you're throwing up if you dislike something."

She demonstrates, for a moment becoming someone else entirely. "Signing is another language. It can convey happiness, hunger, getting wet. It gets the sense across but not the shades."

"How can you feel a feeling unless you have a word for it?" says Christopher, the play's overbearing academic patriarch -- who might well be an amalgam of Raine's award-winning father, her Booker Prize-winning godfather, Julian Barnes, and the Nobel-prize-winning playwright and provocateur, Harold Pinter, in whose original 2000 play Celebration she had a walk-on part as a waitress. ("It was lovely to be on stage every night and hear that funny, spare and often poetic prose coming over the Tannoy; it gets into your bones.")

As Tribes so deftly implies, too much talking can be a disability too. Raine senses when enough is enough; after revealing that she's sold the film rights of the play in America, that she is writing a script that relocates the characters to New York, she jumps up and sets about gathering her numerous shopping bags.

"Look, I've bought a tongue," she says good-naturedly, opening a carrier bag to reveal a whopping great cut of pinky-grey meat.

"I'm not sure how to cook it," she adds as I recoil. "I think you peel the skin off it first; I'll give that a go and see."

With that Raine kisses me on each cheek and strides off, blonde hair streaming, in the direction she came from.

Tribes opens on Saturday at the MTC Theatre, Melbourne. Tickets: $33-$99. Bookings: (03) 8688 0800.

Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/the-bold-language-of-not-talking/story-fn9d344c-1226256677700