The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with nearly 3,500 shows. This year, Playbill is in Edinburgh for the entire month in August for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!
Every year while Edinburgh Festival Fringe takes over the city, it coincides with several other festivals. One such event is the Edinburgh Deaf Festival, which runs this year August 11-20. Some of the shows overlap between the two, with the Edinburgh Deaf Festival offering over 60 events this year including theatre, comedy, workshops, exhibitions, and more. Thirteen shows are deaf-led at Fringe this year, and one of those is Jenny Sealey’s Self-Raising.
Jenny Sealey is deaf, though as she says in the show, she’s quite good at passing for hearing. She tells three secrets of her life in a work that touches on heavy topics with the lightest, and often very comedic, touch. She addresses growing up deaf in a hearing family, the ways doctors devalued her when a childhood accident turned her deaf at age seven, and the quite funny upsides that came with it. (Sealey recalls how her mother handled many uncomfortable phone conversations on her behalf—including a breakup with a beau when she was an adolescent.)
Accompanying Sealey is a British Sign Language interpreter who also interacts with Sealey and helps move props. There is also captioning on a screen onstage that is used to project photos of the people who figure in her story. Sealey wrote the piece with both deaf and hearing audiences in mind. In one example, she discusses how family gatherings are a nightmare for lip-reading conversations—so she does most of the washing up, and interweaves that by signing directly to deaf audience members who “will get what [she’s] talking about” in describing the loneliness that comes with group gatherings of hearing people.
The show is about Sealey’s life and yes, that includes her experiences as a deaf woman. But not all of the secrets she shares are defined by that part of her. The show asks questions about the secrets we keep, who we keep them for, and if we should keep them. It's questions everyone, deaf or hearing, faces and asks themselves. One secret of hers implicated her mother, who asked Sealey not to tell anyone until after she died. Sealey at one point plays out what feels like an ending to the show. And then she jokes, “But, then something big happened last year. My mum died. And she fucked up my play.” It’s a moment that immediately lands with the audience as Sealey had already smartly built up a meta-theatrical narrative throughout her performance.
Self-Raising is a show for all audiences—it is accessible to so many through its integration of speech, captioning, and BSL interpretation. It’s an invitation for hearing and deaf communities to meet and find common ground in the life experiences we all face. And with Sealey’s self-assuredness and humor, it becomes a welcoming one of acknowledging difference and embracing it.
Self-Raising plays Pleasance Courtyard’s QueenDome through August 27.
