Audiences for BBC’s The Reunion and ITV’s thriller Code of Silence were intrigued by these British Sign Language dramas and the insight into life as deaf person. Now a new crime thriller performed by deaf actors comes to the Fringe in a world premiere.
There’s a growing awareness of BSL as a language in its own right and deaf actors like East Ender’s star and Strictly Come Dancing winner Rose Ayling-Ellis have had a big role to play in creating understanding of life as a deaf person. If Ayling-Ellis is having an impact on our TV screens then deaf writer and performer Nadia Nadarajah is an equally big presence on stage.
If you were lucky enough to see Nadarajah’s debut play The Ghost of Alexander Blackwood as part of last year’s Deaf Festival you will know what a writing talent she is. She was also the star of The Globe Theatre’s BSL version of Anthony & Cleopatra last autumn and responsible for translating the Shakespeare play into BSL. Now Nadarajah returns with a new play, a crime thriller called Echoes Across Time – and Edinburgh audiences will get to see its first ever staging.
The plot is about three women across three timelines. In 2000 and 2012, two deaf women disappear without explanation. In 2025, faint traces of their lives begin to resurface. Echoes Across Time follows one woman’s search to uncover hidden connections and untold histories. Searching for answers in the past, she uncovers new questions: where do the clues lead and what is waiting to be found?
Where did Nadarajah get the idea for the play? “I have a lot of hearing friends and I am always seeing them with headphones on. I thought they were listening to music but one day my housemate told me that lots of people listen to podcasts.”
She became fascinated by the popularity of podcasts, particularly why so many people listened to true crime ones and, being a writer and performer, started looking into how they were made: “I wanted to know about the special effects, the background sounds, how an atmosphere is created that brings these stories to life. I was walking around my local park thinking, what is the deaf version of this?”
The answer is Echoes of Silence which she wrote earlier in the year. Nararajah writes in BSL, which is a different language to English. The script format is ideal for the three deaf actors who play the women involved in the mystery, but it needs to work for hearing audiences too, so it was translated into English. At the performances on 15 – 17 August hearing audiences will experience this translation voiced by a performance interpreter and there will be subtitles too.
It might be influenced by the current obsession with true crime (it starts off in a garden because apparently a high percentage of real murders take place in garden settings) but the story has all come from Nadarajah’s imagination: “I travel on the train a lot to Edinburgh and get inspired by what I can see when I look out the window.”
Berwick-upon-Tweed in particular caught her eye, “I regularly go through it and think it looks like a beautiful place, but what secrets could be hidden there? One of the questions I want people to think about is how well do you know your neighbours?”
Bringing Nadarajah’s story to life are actors Irina Vartopeanu, from Romania and now based in Glasgow, Claire Wetherall, a Geordie living in Scotland, and Benedetta Zanetti, who is originally from Italy. Naomi Gray will be interpreting the BSL into English.
