Review: Bull at Home Manchester

“…confronting, uncomfortable and deeply compelling…”

Bull by Mike Bartlett, Home Manchester

By Hannah Molyneux

The theatre is packed: the Thursday night audience is out in full force for Deafinitely Theatre’s adaptation of Mike Bartlett’s Bull. It’s testament to the following that Deafinitely Theatre has and to how successful theatre can be when accessibility is valued and prioritised. This adaptation combines British Sign Language with captioning to bring to life a powerful and unsettling story of workplace bullying, dominance, and cruelty. 

The story centres on three colleagues as they compete – with increasing nastiness – for two jobs. Paul Burgess’ set is immediately striking in its simplicity – an impersonal office scene with two chairs acting as an enduring reminder that there is not room for everybody here. Bordered on all sides, the stage is a boxing ring, a bear-baiting pit, an inescapable place in which Thomas is pushed and prodded to the point of breakdown. The sound and lighting work well to complement this physical space, gaining almost a physicality of their own. The uncomfortable silence of the opening gives way to humming and buzzing sounds that build steadily to overwhelm, accompanied by beautifully subtle lighting changes that really draw us into the toxicity of the environment.

The play is driven by the interactions between the three colleagues and the atmosphere that this creates. Ciaran O’Breen’s Thomas is pitiful but not unlikeable – we are desperate for him to pull himself together but never irritated by his helplessness. Jasmine Whipps as Isobel is genuinely frightening, a stone-cold bitch whose expressions exude disdain and superiority. Hers is a different cruelty to that of Danny Lee’s Tony, who swaggers about the stage with an inflated sense of self-importance and an intimidating physicality that is disarming and threatening. Their behaviour is allowed by David Sands as Carter, the boss, who not only represents the oppressive workplace system but reinforces it too. Their movement around the stage is brilliant, creating a physical lack of closeness as well as a psychological one. As the action intensifies, this movement becomes more animalistic and primal, taking the play’s themes of survival and competition back to their roots with surreal and yet frighteningly resonant effect.

The movement is especially striking given the fact that the play is exclusively signed throughout. Signing elevates the text in a unique way – dark humour is given a visual edge and emotion is laid bare for us in a way that goes beyond speech. The interplay between movement and signing is so organic that it never feels forced or out of place, but rather an extension of what already exists in the text.

Toward the end of the performance, I find myself wondering why Deafinitely Theatre has chosen this play to perform deaf perspectives, and while I can’t speculate on the reason, it undoubtedly makes for a particularly powerful rendering of the original play. When a story focuses so much on the idea of survival of the fittest, it packs an extra punch to have this theme explored and delivered by deaf actors to a deaf and disabled audience. The questions raised by this play about what dominance and weakness look like, who gets to have the upper hand and who gets to decide, are all the more impactful in this context. This production takes us beyond the workplace and challenges us to look further into society – it is confronting, uncomfortable and deeply compelling.

Bull plays at Home Manchester until Saturday 26 September. Tickets are available here.

Hannah Molyneux is a proudly Mancunian writer and musician whose day job revolves around community engagement. She is passionate about community arts and the huge benefits they have for people and places. Hannah can most often be found enjoying the great outdoors or optimistically crafting with her children. You can read more of her writing here. You can find her on Instagram here.