AustLit

Reclusive crime novelist Patricia Carlon rarely left her Bexley home and communicated almost exclusively by letter. Despite being compared to Hitchcock and Rendell, she never gave interviews or worked the publicity circuit.

The reason came to light after her death in 2002. Carlon had been profoundly deaf since childhood.

In The Cat Lady Of Bexley, writer Sofya Gollan has Carlon emerge from her coffin to reveal her experience of growing up deaf in the 1940s and share her insights - not all of them fashionable or helpful - with Billie (Catherine Moore), a woman learning to cope with the frustrations emerging from her own encroaching deafness.

Performed in English and Auslan, with interpreters shadowing and interacting with the characters, The Cat Lady Of Bexley is cleverly wrought. Carlon's experience is woven with Catherine's and played against a radio theatre style adaptation of one of Carlon's thrillers. It also seeks to educate and carries a subtle Deaf pride message.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald