When Nadia Nadarajah takes the stage at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre from tonight as Cleopatra, she will fulfil a longheld dream: to show others how far you can go as ‘a deaf brown woman who uses sign language and doesn’t speak’
The day before our interview, in a third-floor studio decked out like a 1990s school gym, I get a brief glimpse of actor Nadia Nadarajah in action. It’s just gone 2pm, late in this unique production of Antony & Cleopatra’s third rehearsal week of four. Opening night is just weeks away, next door in the 1,500 capacity Shakespeare’s Globe. Printouts line the walls: sketches of costumes; history factsheets; headshots of the 50+ strong on and off-stage team. Collectively, theirs is a grand ambition: to bring, for the first time, a bilingual English/British Sign Language production to the main stage in a major British theatre for a full-length run for deaf and hearing audiences alike. Its cast of 14 are split near equally between hearing and deaf. Those backstage, too, are working in both languages. It’s no small feat.
“I always said,” Nadarajah tells me, 24 hours later, “if we were to do a play like this, it would need to be 50/50 between a hearing and deaf cast. I wanted to develop a process where both languages were equal: not only deaf actors learning how to collaborate with hearing actors, but it working the other way, too.”
