Ray Bradshaw strolls on stage and launches into a completely silent address to the audience in BSL (British Sign Language); so, completely intelligible to deaf audience members, and mostly baffling to the others.
Then, he starts speaking. Clever opening. It’s funny, and it’s scene-setting, for he is a CODA – Child Of Deaf Adults. Mum and Dad are profoundly deaf, he isn’t; so he’s been from childhood bi-lingual in spoken English and BSL. So he can talk and sign at the same time.
There follows an utterly engrossing evening, two hours with the interval, in which the deaf in the audience can follow everything, and the rest of us can be enlightened on every aspect of signing.
Bradshaw is a brilliant raconteur, and we get loads of anecdotes from his life and career, all of which are fascinating and delivered with razor-sharp comic timing.
You might think it would be a bit of a self-indulgent ego trip to spend a whole evening talking about yourself, your career, and your family life. Not here. His career is full of incident, and has taken him all over the world, often working with major comedy stars, but he’s not boastful, just friendly, warm, and invariably laugh-out-loud funny. Of course he is: he’s from Glasgow. A city, like Liverpool, famed for its ability to be wryly comic about everything.
No wonder he got on so well with John Bishop. He gets on with everyone, from two-year-olds learning to sign, to Arab royalty in Bahrain – and all of this is delivered with unfailing wit, warmth, and empathic humanity, with no trace of sentimentality. Glorious.
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Reviewer: John Christopher Wood | Star rating: *****