Zoe McWhinney Co-Writes Deaf Republic at the Royal Court

2019 Bursary recipient Zoe McWhinney collaborates with Dead Centre as a Sign Language poet to create Deaf Republic, opening at the Royal Court this month.

Zoe is a Deaf and British Sign Language (BSL) native actor, writer/poet, translator, and consultant in Deaf culture. She received an MGCfutures bursary in 2019 to develop her career as a theatre artist by gaining mentorship from Deafinitely Theatre, the first deaf launched and deaf led professional theatre company in the UK producing quality bilingual theatre in BSL and spoken English.

She has now collaborated with Dead Centre, an award-winning theatre company based in Dublin, to create Deaf Republic, an epic modern fable of war, humanity and collective resistance adapted from the poems of Ukrainian-American author Ilya Kaminsky and told through a mix of spoken English, BSL, creative captioning and silence.

Deaf Republic opens at the Royal Court on the 29th August.