Jonny Cotsen, the star of a new play about living as a deaf person in a hearing world, talks to Fedor Tot about the show’s long gestation and how he hopes to avoid being skinned alive.
Louder is Not Always Clearer presents a unique challenge to theatrical audiences, asking us the question: what is it like to be deaf? For Jonny Cotsen, who was born deaf and whose parents were reluctant to stigmatise their son with a ‘disabled’ tag, the answer is a more complicated one than it might seem. He did not meet another deaf person until in his 30s, and it was only when he became a teacher that he realised just how deaf he was. “I was really embarrassed… because as a teacher you have to understand every single kid and what they say. Before I worked in the private sector, as a computer graphic designer. I didn’t give a shit about what people said. I could lip read them fine, but with kids it’s so hard to lip read them. And it was then that I realised I was deaf, really deaf, and I wanted to find out more about my identity.”
This self-realisation led to Jonny meeting other members of the deaf community, learning to sign and finding, at last, a sense of belonging. Despite this relatively recent turn in Jonny’s life, the origins of Louder is Not Always Clearer go as far back as the performer’s university days in the early ‘90s, when he studied Fine Art in Coventry. “I went to university and [it was] the first time I left home, and I started to be more involved with the hearing world. Prior to that, I was always very protected and my mum looked after me. Wherever I went, she helped me. In school she made sure I had one-to-ones, had my brother helping me with a lot of things. I go to university, all of a sudden, poof! I’m independent. I have to try and connect things on my own. [That exhibition] was really about my identity and my way of connecting to the hearing world.”
Going from an art exhibition, a purely visual medium, to an audio-visual one like theatre, might sound like a challenge, but alas “There’s not really much difference between what I did in the exhibition and my theatrical piece because a lot of the things I do in my theatrical piece are very visual. I do a lot of moment, we have a lot of things like projections, subtitles, dubbed sound. For me it has to be accessible to everyone, so therefore I made it very visual.”
Prior to doing an early rendition of this show last year for Experimentica at Chapter, Jonny was unsure whether the show would be relatable at all to either hearing or deaf audiences. “Initially I didn’t really want this performance to be accessible to deaf people. Why? I think it may be a political thing. A lot of hearing theatres don’t make things available to deaf audiences, so I was kind of like, ‘I’m a deaf person, I want to make it more accessible to hearing audience, I don’t care about the deaf audience’. [The] feedback I got from the deaf community [meant that] I had to re- or deconstruct everything. If I had decided to make a performance that’s accessible only to hearing audiences [the deaf community] would probably skin me alive!”
Isolation is a big theme in the play. I ask how Jonny handles this sense of distance in his life; “Isolation to me, it’s not a sad thing. It is a beautiful moment. People talking, the noise going everywhere, it’s getting dark, people getting drunk, I can cope with it. I kind of breath in. I’m quite happy to have my moment to sit on my own and look on the phone, but a lot of people think I’m dumb, I can’t engage with the conversation and some think I’m muted.”
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, why should audiences see Louder is Not Always Clearer: “I think they should come because it’s different; it would be explosive. I want to get people to come on my journey and I want people to leave the theatre think ‘oh my God what have just seen!’”
Louder is Not Always Clearer, Chapter Arts Centre, Tues 6 – Sat 10 Feb, Taliesin, Swansea, Thur 22 Feb. Newport and Milford Haven in April. Tickets: £13/£11 conc. Info: (0)29 2030 4400 (Chapter)/ 01792 602060 (Taliesin).
