00:00 Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor for Sussex Newspapers. It's really
00:06 lovely to speak to Stephen Stewart, who is on the road with a show which will be coming
00:10 to Guildford and Shoreham at the end of January. Important dates because the show is Can Bears
00:16 Ski? which is actually a mishearing and it's a play about hearing, about not hearing and
00:22 about struggling to hear. Tell me about it, what's it saying, what's it setting out to
00:27 do in terms of young people who might struggle to hear?
00:32 I think that quite a few things actually. I think ideally we would like to show for
00:39 a non-hearing audience the stages of being diagnosed as hard of hearing or deaf. For
00:49 non-hearing audiences we would very much like to kind of create something that mirrors their
00:54 experience of things that they might go through or processes that they might be going through
01:00 in the time. And also I think for parents just kind of a blueprint of what do you do
01:05 in these situations when you suspect that your child is deaf or you kind of know something's
01:11 a bit different there and you don't know what to do. So I think that the different demographics
01:16 definitely get different things.
01:18 It sounds fascinating. It's all set around the story of Little Bear and you were talking
01:22 about it as being a hearing journey, the point being that there's a question of realisation,
01:27 awareness and then with that what do you do about it? So it's people realising that Little
01:32 Bear is struggling.
01:33 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So in our story it's certainly kind of flagged up by Dad Bear,
01:43 by Teacher Bear.
01:44 Who's you.
01:45 Yeah, and one of Little Bear's friends as well kind of noticed something's going on
01:50 there and all of that information kind of gets processed through Dad Bear and he decides
01:55 to.
01:56 So what's it doing? Is it about awareness for hearing people, that there are people
02:01 who struggle or is it offering comfort, reassurance to people who struggle or is it both?
02:06 I think absolutely both. I think it is to raise awareness of the deaf experience and
02:10 that's what as a company we've tried to do in this play and get it as close to what deaf
02:18 children will go through but also I think like I said before like just to relate to
02:24 deaf children and kind of make something for them. A lot of things aren't made for them
02:31 so I think it's so nice to see when we, we have all kinds of audiences but when we have
02:37 our non-hearing audiences in and just to see their faces when they realise oh my god that
02:41 character's signing or when we're in the audiologist and it takes them a second to work out we're
02:46 in the audiologist and then they're like I know where they are.
02:50 Really interesting thing is that you enable people who have hearing to experience what
02:55 it is to not have hearing or to be struggling with hearing don't you?
03:00 Absolutely, absolutely and we also do, we show it from the point of view of Little Bear
03:05 so anything that Little Bear doesn't hear or mishears the audience won't hear or will
03:10 mishear.
03:11 So you will mumble that?
03:13 Yeah so we use a series of mumbling or blah blah blah blah whilst talking to Little Bear
03:18 just to kind of highlight to the audience how sometimes deaf or hard of hearing people
03:25 can hear different things and not be able to make things out or just to catch the odd
03:30 word we do that quite a lot where just one word in the line is spoken clearly and the
03:35 rest is mumbled.
03:36 And the title is an example of that isn't it?
03:41 Absolutely the title Can Bear Ski is actually not what is said in Little Bear but it's what
03:48 Little Bear hears over and over again and it's because of context clues that Little
03:52 Bear comes to that realisation because in the first scene Dad Bear is watching a bear
03:58 ski and asks a Little Bear a question to which Little Bear interprets that as Can Bear Ski.
04:06 It sounds fantastic, it sounds incredibly rewarding too.
04:09 Good luck with the future tour and you will be at Guildford and Shoreham end of January.
04:14 Lovely to speak to you.
04:15 Thank you very much.
04:16 Thank you.
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