Thursday March 28th, 2024
Download SceneNow app

Egypt's First Ever Play For The Deaf & Hearing-Impaired

This remarkable and unique play has won the hearts of its audience as well as its own actors.

Staff Writer

We rejoice every time we hear that minorities in Egypt got some much-deserved loving. When we discovered that an Egyptian play, called Perfume, was produced for a hearing impaired and deaf audience, we were profoundly touched by this game changer in performance accessibility.

Perfume is directed by Mohammed Allam, having opened in July and still ongoing, and features eight young actors with hearing and speaking impediments, as well as six professional, fully abled, actors, according to Al Monitor. The director told the news source that his play was the first of its kind to gather professional actors with hearing-impaired actors and that the inspiration for the play derived from having discovered that there are 5 million such people in Egypt who have hearing impairments.

The play is performed in sign language and has been met with tremendous success as well as admiration from the impaired and non-impaired audience. It also tells the story of the hardships hearing impaired individuals face on a daily basis and their interactions with the rest of the community.

The project is highly ambitious and required tremendous efforts of coordination and understanding. As such, individuals like Amar Adel who lead the non-hearing actors and directs the sign language in the play, are needed.

“I nominated a number of deaf people for the roles in the play and some of them were chosen by the director, who met with them to get to know them closely and get acquainted with their daily problems,” she said to Al Monitor, expressing her pride to have worked on the first work of art dedicated to them particularly.

Allam is currently considering the idea of establishing a state-affiliated theatre for the deaf in the future.

The play runs every night at 9 p.m. at Al-Tali'a Theatre.

You can find more about the play on their Facebook