Review of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing (Directed by Robert Hastie for Ramps on the Moon) at the Crucible, Sheffield Theatres, 20 September 2022

This year it was Sheffield Theatres’ turn to lead the annual Ramps on the Moon production. Ramps on the Moon is a collaborative partnership between seven powerhouse theatres and venues from around the UK, who take turns to host productions each year. The goal behind the project is to ‘enrich stories, and the ways in which they are told, by normalising the presence of deaf, disabled and neurodiverse people both on and off stage’, as the director, Robert Hastie, put it in his programme notes. Sheffield Theatres chose to perform Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, a play that currently seems to be having a moment of particular prominence with the likes of the National Theatre and the Globe both putting on productions during the same run, as well as the RSC earlier in the year. The production took to the stage of the Crucible during its 50th anniversary year. The play opened with the cast, which was a mixture of deaf, neurodiverse, disabled and non-disabled performers, introducing their character’s name and detailing their costume for the benefit of audio description. Their opening lines were interlaced with jokes from the off, with Benedick announcing that he was wearing a blue suit, trainers and ‘a chip on my shoulder’. The play was made up of a combination of British Sign Language, Sign Supported English, visual storytelling and physical theatre so each character also introduced what techniques they would be using as each actor differed in this respect. Although this amount of information seemed overwhelming at first, one soon relaxed as the play began to flow and it became clearer how the story would be communicated. The characters tended to come in pairs whereby one performer signed the lines and the other simultaneously spoke them, swapping for each character’s lines, so all grounds were covered at almost any time. As opposed to having audio describers or sign language interpreters placed at the perimeter of the stage, accessibility was built into the roots of the performance. Additionally, each side of the stage had digital caption boards. Emily