In Vasenka, a fictional town under military occupation, a deaf boy is shot by soldiers and the town’s inhabitants become deaf in response. The opening of Deaf Republic – the remarkable second collection by the Ukrainian-American poet and translator Ilya Kaminsky – sets in train a narrative of resistance through silence, as “deafness, an insurgency, begins” and the soldiers start executing the citizens of Vasenka, who refuse to hear their orders.
Since its publication in 2019, Deaf Republic has won multiple awards and been critically lauded for what the former poet laureate Andrew Motion has described as “a folk drama that feels archetypal, yet is deeply revealing of our here and now”. That quality of being current, urgent in its commentary on war yet as timeless as a fable, appealed to Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, co-directors of theatre company Dead Centre, who have adapted the work for stage.
