Paul Belmonte on signing Shakespeare for the deaf

A chance meeting with a deaf woman propelled Paul Belmonte into a career that has seen him become interwoven with the Scottish deaf community as a sign language interpreter.

Paul Belmonte holds up his index finger and hits it backwards and forwards with a closed fist before bringing two horizontal index fingers together, then wagging the right one. “The man who robbed you – like what?” he says paraphrasing, for my benefit, an exchange between a clown and the rogue Autolycus from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. But it’s his facial expressions, a furrowing of the eyebrows here, a pursing of the lips there, that invest the story with real drama. Watching him fill the space in front of him with fluid shapes, conjuring up images from thin air, it is impossible not to see signing for deaf people as an art form.

Belmonte is a qualified British Sign Language interpreter; as such he is the interface between Scotland’s deaf and hearing populations. In any given week, he can find himself accompanying clients to hospital appointments or parents’ meetings or disciplinary hearings.

Dealing with the same people year in year out, his life has become interwoven with the community he serves. He is there for their most intimate moments – prenatal scans, first days at school, weddings and funerals. “There’s a lot of health work,” he says. “Sometimes things will be going well and we’ll be giving people good news, but on other occasions we will be giving them the very worst news. Then we see their world being turned upside down. We have to be sensitive and professional, but sometimes I do shed a wee tear.”

When I interview Belmonte, in the upper room of the former Albany Deaf Church, which is now the headquarters of Deaf Action in Edinburgh, he is rehearsing for a signed performance of The Winter’s Tale in the city’s Festival Theatre. When the curtain rises on the Royal Shakespeare Company this afternoon, he will be standing on the stage alongside the actors, communicating not just the words they speak, but the intensity of their delivery.

The story of how Paul came to be here is in itself worthy of dramatisation. Having left school at 15, he was scrubbing tenement stairs for a living when he met a deaf woman at the church he used to attend and decided to learn to sign in order to communicate with her. Already able to sign the alphabet, he quickly grasped that, unlike learning basic Italian, which he found relatively easy, mastering BSL would require a shift in perspective. While spoken/written languages are linear, one word coming directly after the other, signing is three-dimensional and has a dynamic and structure all its own. “You have to think in pictures,” Belmonte says. “You have to set the scene. You can’t say, ‘The man stands on the bridge,’ you have to start with the bridge so the man has something to stand on.”

The facial expressions are not an added extra, they can radically alter the meaning. For example, the sign for “angry” – a cupped hand moved up and down at chest level as if scratching – can mean anything from irritated to bealing. An interpreter at, say, a meeting to resolve a grievance between a deaf worker and a boss, will have to weigh up all the accompanying body language, and choose which word to use.

With no money and few formal qualifications, Paul would probably have stopped at the BSL level two course, were it not for the persistence of a tutor who presented him with the forms for a part-time course at Heriot-Watt University (now a full-time degree course). Twelve years later, he works full-time for Deaf Action. It is clear he feels a bond with those he interprets for, yet he is careful never to overstep the mark. Conscious of the pride and ownership deaf people feel towards BSL, he presents himself as an honoured guest in their community.

“They’re very welcoming and good-natured – more than I would be if I had to share my most private moments with an outsider, but they are still very much, ‘This is ours. We have taught you the language, we’re allowing you to use it but don’t ever forget who it belongs to.’ And it’s just so beautiful to watch a deaf person in full flow. I am proficient, but I will never be able to use it like a native speaker. They’re expressing themselves like Oscar Wilde and I’m more like Manuel from Fawlty Towers.”

Deafness is so bound up with identity, many people refer to themselves as Deaf, with a capital D, like being Scottish. After centuries of oppression – and parents of deaf children are still sometimes told to avoid BSL so they learn English first – signing is a symbol of their dignity and heritage.

There are 6,000 deaf people in Scotland who regard signing as their first language, and yet their needs are often overlooked. There is a misapprehension, for example, that written English is an acceptable form of communication, but many struggle to fully comprehend what is, to them, a second language.

Although Belmonte says the Scottish government has invested in training, Scotland has just 80 interpreters compared to 750 in Finland (a country with a similar deaf population). Mark Griffin MSP is bringing forward a BSL Bill which, if passed, would require the government to create and implement an action plan and report on progress twice in each parliamentary session.

In the meantime, Belmonte is an enthusiastic advocate for a job in which he has shared a platform with Northern Irish peace activist and Nobel laureate Mairead Corrigan, met the BFG, dined with a Finnish blackjack croupier and attended the Queen’s garden party.

There have been moments of sheer terror; imagine never having canoed and being asked to go out in a one-man kayak and sign to a party of deaf youngsters who are also having their first lesson. But there are also moments of light relief. One of Belmonte’s favourite jobs is signing for nativity plays, with parents beaming with pride as he translates all the little mistakes and improvisations that make such events memorable. “It must look hilarious,” he says. “There’s angel one, shepherd one, Mary, Joseph, donkey, angel two and then, perched at the end on an infant’s chair, me.”

Having to adapt to unusual circumstances can be demanding. A less obvious challenge for BSL interpreters is understanding dialects. As signing is an evolving language, regional differences have emerged, particularly in Scotland where education was centred on schools for deaf people, including Donaldson’s – formerly in Edinburgh, now in Linlithgow – and St Vincent’s in Glasgow. While Donaldson’s is non-denominational, St Vincent’s was run by nuns. The signing that developed there was heavily influenced by Irish Sign Language, and can prove baffling for east-coasters.

Interpreting for theatre performances is an enjoyable sideline, something Belmonte does on a freelance basis. That said, it’s a lot of work. While the actors are playing just one part, he’s playing them all, investing much energy in capturing every linguistic nuance and dramatic cadence. As with all long jobs, however, the workload will be split between two interpreters, with Paul taking on the second half of the play.

One of the reasons he likes theatre is its potential for high jinks. Once, when signing for The Comedy of Errors, he was told to stand back when a particular line was delivered “because that’s the point Jim will be running past you naked with a sparkler between his bum cheeks”. Another time, signing for a pantomime in Kirkcaldy, he found himself dancing with the Dame. “They needed me off my spot because a pyrotechnic was going off so they asked the blue fairy to dance with me. She was beautiful and I thought ‘nice one’, but she said, ‘I’m stage left, I cannae dae it,’ so they asked the cat and she was lovely and I thought ‘brilliant’, but she said, ‘I’m stage left too,’ so the call went up ‘Billy’ – and Billy had wild hair, fake breasts and lipstick and that’s who I ended up dancing with.”

Yet, while theatre is rewarding, Paul derives the greatest satisfaction from being able to serve as a conduit for the views of deaf people and a means by which they can participate fully in the hearing world. The pivotal role BSL interpreters play in the lives of those they serve was brought home to him during his first funeral mass.

“I was getting quite uptight because I couldn’t get hold of the priest. I didn’t know what hymns they were going to sing, I didn’t have a eulogy,” he says. “And then I looked across at the deaf person who was there for a close relative and I thought, ‘I can’t imagine losing my mother or father and having to go to the funeral and not understand it.’ That’s why I’m here. That’s what gets me up in the mornings.”