PLAY IN SIGN-LANGUAGE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 108, 8 May 1936, Page 10

PLAY IN SIGN-LANGUAGE

EXPERIMENT IN LONDON AUDIENCE FULLY APPRECIATIVE An audience that crowded the Little Theatre, Adelphi, recently saw a play produced in sign-language. And every body not only enjoyed it, but also understood it I This would not have been possible, however, if Sir Richard Paget—-who i has been working for a year on natural pantomime and who has also conducted experiments in sign-languages on two zoo chimpanzees —had not been there to preface the play with an explanatory demonstration of speaking by gestures. Because of the brief initiation into what as first seemed an impenetrable mystery, even the jokes were seen—with far more dirc&tnes than usual. It was a simple story: A young airman, accompanied by his sweetheart, makes a forced landing on an unchartered island. Luckily, he knows the sign language and he has time to give the girl a lesson in it before the dusky king of the. cannibal island arrives on the scene, toying promisingly with a very ugly spear. Aided by the young man, she <<speaks’ l to him; he understands, his savage heart is melted and all is well. The curtain fell after the king had made a “speech” in the sign-language, pointing out the great benefits of this method of communication in promoting inter-racial friendship. In this introductory talk, Sir Richard Paget —who worked on the Admiralty Board of Invention and Research during the war—showed how ordinary speech had been developed almost as an automatic system of mm.th movements in unison with movements of the hands. Sir Richard pictured a future time when the peoples of all nations would be able to understand one another through the sign-language—when they would bo able to converse oyer great distances by means of television. There was another novelty, in addition to the play—a poem “spoken” in signs, to the accompaniment of piano and violin. Sir Richard himseli wrote the music, and played the piano. lie , also rendered the poem into English, r