Louder is Not Always Clearer

"Welcome to my world" says Jonny Cotsen as he gets us to try and lip read a video. Jonny Cotsen is a teacher, artist, campaigner, father and deaf from birth and has set out to challenge our preconceptions.

At times the show was frustrating  as Jonny typed his conversation with us onto a screen. But then I realised, my frustration was nothing compared to what he lives with all the time. Communication is harder without speech, things do take longer to say and can come over with less emotion. A section where he and an audience member signed to each other for a while left the rest of us out, just as the deaf are left out of many spoken conversations. His impressions of "hearing people" would be much funnier if they weren't so damned true and didn't make us feel so guilty about how we do respond - "Can you drive? Yes? Wow!". Are we really too busy to slow down a bit to let the 1 in 6 of us that will suffer hearing loss take part?

We ended, the whole audience, singing and trying to sign-along with a song about how to respond ... great idea, I was rubbish! Jonny asks us to always remember the mantra "Deaf not Stupid" and so we bloody should.