A deaf-led theatre company is bringing one of British theatre’s most brutal workplace dramas to north London, staging Mike Bartlett’s Bull entirely in British Sign Language at Park Theatre in Finsbury Park.
Deafinitely Theatre’s production, directed by Paula Garfield, runs at the venue until 24 October. Across 75 tense minutes, the play locks its audience in a meeting room where three colleagues have been called in to see their boss, with redundancies in the air and survival far from guaranteed. The set-up is brutally simple: three employees, one boss, and a decision about who stays and who goes.
David Sands plays Carter, the boss, all grim management-speak and survival of the fittest. Against him stands Thomas, played by Ciaran O’Breen: nervy, hunched and achingly vulnerable, a man who understands all too well that losing this job would make finding another brutally hard. Jasmine Whipps is Isobel, brassy and calculating, armed with a repertoire of passive-aggressive put-downs; Danny Lee, making his acting debut, is Tony, the slick, overconfident colleague who clocks what Isobel is doing to Thomas, and is only too happy to join in.
What unfolds is a methodical demolition. Isobel and Tony humiliate Thomas and freeze him out, nattering about acquaintances he does not know and after-work drinks he was never invited to, engineering his collapse in front of Carter. The pacing tightens like a vice: the piece grows more claustrophobic as the pressure mounts, sympathy fixed on Thomas even as a queasy fascination pulls the eye towards how far his tormentors will go. The closing stretch is devastating, as Isobel subjects a broken Thomas to a final emotional kicking, all while acknowledging she knows exactly what she is doing, drawn as if by instinct to attack anything she reads as weak.
The production is performed wholly in British Sign Language, woven together with elements of mime and inventive captioning that reaches well beyond ordinary surtitles, plus projected artwork. The visual language becomes part of the drama’s engine: communication itself turns into a weapon, and the result is a stark, unsettling portrait of how perceived weakness can invite cruelty, delivered without a spoken word. Deafinitely Theatre is a London-based, deaf-led professional company making bilingual work for deaf and hearing audiences, and Bartlett, whose play premiered in 2013, is a long-standing collaborator. Deaf-led companies remain a rarity in mainstream programming, so a full BSL staging of a modern classic on an off-West End stage is a landmark for accessible theatre in the capital: deaf audiences are placed at the very centre of the experience, while hearing audiences are handed an entirely new theatrical vocabulary.
The themes have only gained force since the play’s premiere. Anyone who has endured a redundancy round will recognise the atmosphere Bartlett bottles: the way ordinary workplace ease curdles into rumour, suspicion and whispered accusations of favouritism the moment jobs are at stake, and how quickly colleagues will sacrifice one another to stay safe. Few plays capture so precisely the dread of being summoned for a “quick chat” with management. It is a study of power that feels built for the present moment.
Park Theatre, in the heart of Finsbury Park, has earned its reputation as one of north London’s boldest neighbourhood venues, and a deaf-led reimagining of Bartlett fits that adventurous streak. It is another feather in the cap for London theatre, a scene that has recently seen Andrew Lloyd Webber made a Freeman of the City of London and Cate Blanchett holding court at the National Theatre, and further evidence of Finsbury Park’s cultural momentum. The production arrives with a four-star reception behind it.
Bull runs at Park Theatre, Finsbury Park until 24 October.
