Updates

Creating a Playscript in BSL

A man in black signs in front of a digital screen displaying colourful comic-style illustrations and text, in a classroom or lecture setting.

Research questions:

How do we make theatre in British Sign Language, and what is the learning process needed to support a full commission in BSL?

How do we write and record a playscript conceived entirely in BSL?

The VX Lab – Creating a Playscript in BSL took place in autumn 2025 at Sheffield Theatres.

We invited Deaf artists and creatives to work together over a week in Sheffield. They experimented and tested a variety of approaches in response to the research questions.

The ambition for the week was to create a script in BSL, recognising the innate creativity of this beautiful language.

The Lab was delivered in partnership with Sheffield Theatres.

BSL writing rehearsals and performance

To have a BSL script, it is necessary to have a first and foremost drawing or photograph that is not translated from a text-based source, e.g., Shakespeare, modernism, naturalism, Greek, and more. It would be logged as BSL methods without written lines by lines, and word by word.

Mary Jayne Russell De Clifford, VX Lab participant

What did we learn?

The Lab revealed that the original question — how to write and record a script in BSL — was rooted in a hearing-led, text-based framework that did not fully reflect the embodied and spatial nature of BSL.

The most significant learning was therefore a reframing of the task: BSL theatre is not simply written but composed or choreographed in four dimensions. Creating space for BSL-led composition is not simply about access provision; it is about linguistic legitimacy and artistic equity.

The process did not produce a definitive scripting system. It established the foundations of a methodology and demonstrating that scripting BSL is both possible and artistically necessary.

Report: Creating a Playscript in BSL

Top tips

  1. Reframe what constitutes a script.

  2. Recognise beginning in BSL rather than translation from English as a creative pathway.

  3. Embed Deaf leadership from inception.

  4. Invest time and resources for access and the core creative process.