vary a lot in efficiency and even when they work the voices have a thin, distant timbre, as if you are listening to the performance through a telephone on stage that has been left off the hook. It’s usually preferable to sit in the front row and rely on your own hearing aid, but then you risk getting a crick in your neck from holding your chin up at an angle of forty-five degrees for two or three hours, and being sprayed with the actors’ spittle in scenes of high emotion. Also Fred reasonably complains that they always seem to be over-acting when you are sitting that close, so we rarely do. If the dialogue has a lot of unfamiliar dialect or regional accents then it doesn’t matter where you sit or what kind of hearing aid you use: you’ll miss most of the consonants as usual, and the vowels will all be unfamiliar, so you might as well be listening to Hungarian. Theatre-in-the round is equally hopeless. I never did see the point of making actors turn their backs on a substantial section of the audience while they’re speaking, even when my hearing was good, but now it’s like listening to a play through a door which keeps opening and shutting. But the most exasperating thing about going to the theatre, even if the play is in standard English and performed on a proscenium stage, is missing the jokes. I’ll be following the dialogue perfectly well and then suddenly one of the characters says something which makes the audience roar with laughter, but I missed it. The reason being that lines are only funny when they are unexpected as well as relevant, so I can’t anticipate them or infer what was said from the context. This can happen repeatedly all through a play, and is incredibly frustrating: comprehensible but banal exchanges of speech are punctuated by apparently witty and amusing lines which I don’t hear. Sometimes after such an evening I buy the playtext and read it to discover what I missed, thus experiencing the work in two different forms, once as theatre of the absurd and again as well-made play. Occasionally I read the text in advance of going to the theatre: then I get all the jokes, but of course they aren’t funny any more, because I’m expecting them.
Going to the cinema is no less frustrating, except for foreign films which have subtitles; but there are not many of those which you can’t wait to see, and most will turn up on television eventually. The films which Fred wants to see because everybody is talking about them are nearly all British or American, and I reckon that I miss between fifty and eighty per cent of the dialogue in most of them, because the characters have regional accents (Glaswegian is worst), or the actors drawl and mumble in Method style, or the music and other background noise on the soundtrack overwhelm the words, or a combination of all those things. When we saw Brokeback Mountain, for instance, I completely missed the significance of the scene at the end when the cowboy finds his old shirt in the closet of his dead buddy’s bedroom, because I didn’t catch the word ‘shirt’ in his line when they came down from the mountain much earlier in the story and he said he must have left it behind. In fact the other guy had taken it surreptitiously as a sentimental memento of their homosexual idyll on the mountain, as the cowboy realises in the wordless scene when, visiting the parents, he discovers his shirt in the closet. Fred had to explain all this to me in the car on the way home. She often has to explain such things to me on the way home from the theatre or cinema. It’s got to a point where I am reluctant to offer any opinion at all on what we have just seen in case I reveal some ludicrous and humiliating misunderstanding of a basic element of the plot.
I discovered recently that there are occasional performances in local cinemas of new feature films with subtitles for the hearing-impaired, listed on the Internet, but they are put on at very antisocial times, like eleven o’clock on a weekday morning, when Fred is either unable or unwilling to keep me company. I went to see a subtitled Woody Allen movie at such an hour, in an almost deserted multiplex on the outskirts of the city,