As any dance fan or choreographer will tell you, a story needs no words to tell it. Character, emotion and narrative can all be powerfully projected straight from the body. And yet theatre still feels inextricably linked to text and speech. Even the name of the place we usually watch it (an auditorium) projects an idea of listening as theatre’s dominant sense. This year’s International Festival, however, has three theatre pieces that defy reliance on verbal speech, opting instead, with very different reasons, for stories told via the body: through gesture, action and non-verbal language. 

Mario Banushi, creator and director of Taverna Miresia: Mario, Bella, Anastasia, which explores memory and grief, did not begin with the intention of making a silent performance. ‘We simply kept following the images, the bodies and the memories. Every time words appeared they somehow felt smaller than what we were trying to express.’ Language, Banushi says, does exist in the piece but in subtler ways; gesture, music, even the breath between two actors looking at each other. 

The piece is personal to Banushi, set in an imagined version of the Albanian restaurant his family once owned (Taverna Miresia translates as ‘restaurant of kindness’). ‘I think there are moments in life that become too important for words,’ Banushi says. ‘When you lose someone or when you remember your childhood, language often arrives too late. I wanted the audience to experience those emotions directly rather than having them described.’

It was these same intimate unspoken family connections that sparked the idea for Belgian company Olympique Dramatique’s new interpretation of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Director Stijn Van Opstal had been keen to direct a play for Flanders’ d/Deaf communities for some time (‘with whom we live but whose language I did not speak’, Van Opstal says), but hadn’t landed on the right piece. Then he began to consider The Seagull’s themes of intergenerational misunderstanding. 

In the play, the unfolding drama is triggered by a disastrous theatrical performance, delivered by a young playwright and an ingenue actress, whose older relatives and neighbours react with scorn. ‘There’s the younger generation of theatre makers, who are searching for a new form, a new language, a new worldview,’ Van Opstal says. ‘And alongside them, the older generation who do not quite understand this and perhaps feel somewhat threatened by it.’ The uncertainties of communication both break and remake relationships in the play. ‘Because it all takes place within a family context, the love is strong enough to make them want to understand one another. In that respect, The Seagull was the perfect meeting place for this production.’

In a first for Edinburgh International Festival, the play will be performed with sign language as its primary medium, specifically Flemish Sign Language (FSL). Van Opstal cast a mixture of fluent FSL-speakers and established actors who are beginners at signing. He has also re-titled the piece as [seagull] to reference the closed-caption subtitles theatres often use to make plays accessible for d/Deaf audiences. ‘The closed captions in the title serve as a reminder that people view things from different perspectives,’ he says. ‘The hearing audience will be welcomed into a language and a community that are not naturally accessible in everyday life, whilst the sign language-using audience will experience a performance in their mother tongue.’ In essence, the production turns accessibility on its head, placing hearing audience members in the position usually experienced by d/Deaf audiences. ‘The brackets here are not optional,’ Van Opstal says, ‘but a reminder. There are people who see things differently.’

There are already longstanding and beloved genres of theatre though, where stories told through body language have always had a home, such as silent cinema and clowning. French theatre company Bakélite’s Hostile is a family-friendly show which builds on established traditions of non-verbal comedy. Creator and performer Olivier Rannou was drawn to the very physical genre of spaghetti westerns, which emerged from Hollywood in the 1950s under directors such as Sergio Leone, full of swaggering cowboys, smoking campfires and stubborn horses. In approaching the piece as a wordless show, Rannou wanted to reflect and recreate ‘the taciturn, violent and cynical characters who are more akin to anti-heroes’. 

Letting the body speak for itself allowed Rannou to keep the appeal of the show broad. ‘Above all, I want the audience to experience the adventure in real time, with the action unfolding right before their eyes, as if they were actually there,’ he explains. ‘You can literally see the character suffering from the sun and heat, witness his desperate quest for water or follow his frantic flight. It is an entire universe that I enjoy evoking and subverting, and whose imagery I attempt to reinvent on stage.’ 

Banushi also found visual images formed his starting point for Taverna Miresia. ‘Before rehearsals, I draw a lot,’ he says. ‘I imagine very precise pictures, almost like photographs or paintings. Then, together with the performers, we slowly search for the physical life inside those images.’ But ultimately a story told without words all comes down to actions, which operate as a catalyst for the characters’ emotions. ‘We ask very simple questions,’ Banushi says. ‘How does this body breathe? How does it carry memory? How does someone touch another person when they know it might be the last time? When a gesture is truthful and necessary, the feeling follows naturally. I trust the body more than I trust psychology.’

Taverna Miresia: Mario, Bella, Anastasia, Church Hill Theatre, 26 & 27, 29 August, 8pm; 28 August, 5pm & 8.30pm; [seagull], Studio Theatre, 7 August, 4pm; 8–11 August, 7.30pm; Hostile, Church Hill Theatre, 8–11 August, 2pm; 9 & 10 August, 6pm; main picture: Theofilos Tsimas.

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