Imagine fancying a night out at the theatre. You scroll through what’s on, pick a show, pick a date that suits you and book your ticket. Simple.
Now imagine doing the same thing as a deaf or hard-of-hearing person and discovering that out of an entire run, there are perhaps two captioned performances. Maybe one. Maybe none. The dates don’t suit. The seats are limited. The show is sold out. So you don’t go.
This is the reality of theatregoing for millions of people in the UK.
Back in 2018, the National Theatre launched something genuinely groundbreaking: Smart Caption Glasses.
Developed in partnership with Accenture and Epson, the glasses display closed captions directly in the wearer’s line of sight as the performance unfolds.
The system “listens” to what’s happening on stage and sends synchronised text to the glasses over Wi-Fi.
No need to look across to a captioning screen at the side of the auditorium. No need to wait for one of a handful of “access performances” scattered through a run. A patron can turn up to any show on any night, slip the glasses on, and follow the dialogue and lyrics in real time.
It works. It’s been in use at the National Theatre for years. It has been celebrated, awarded, and quite rightly hailed as the future of access in live performance.
So here’s the question that should be ringing in our ears this Deaf Awareness Week:
The reasons aren’t as simple as they sound.
It’s tempting to think the technology must just be too new, or too expensive, or too clunky. The reality is more uncomfortable than that.
It costs money. The glasses aren’t a magic box of pure real-time transcription. Live speech recognition still isn’t accurate enough for the messy, glorious unpredictability of theatre – overlapping dialogue, songs, accents, dialect, ad-libs, audience interaction.
The National Theatre’s system uses speech-following software cued to a pre-prepared script, which means a person has to script every show, time every cue, and operate the system live. For a venue running eight shows a week with rotating repertoire, that’s a meaningful ongoing cost on top of the hardware. The National Theatre can absorb the cost. A 200-seat regional venue or a fringe space cannot.
It isn’t off-the-shelf. The Smart Caption Glasses were built as a bespoke partnership project. They’re not a product that a venue can simply order, plug in, and roll out. Wider licensing and distribution have been slow and there’s been little investment in adapting the system for the producing models of smaller venues, touring productions, or the West End’s commercial houses.
The industry is broken. Let’s be honest. UK theatre has been battered.
Arts Council funding has been cut in real terms, regional venues are closing, ticket sales are still recovering and access budgets are very often the first thing trimmed when the spreadsheets get tight.
Most venues still rely on the old model – a captioned performance or two per run with open captions projected beside the stage. It’s cheaper. It’s also a model that says to deaf audiences: you get the dates we choose, not the dates you choose.
The law doesn’t push hard enough. The Equality Act 2010 requires “reasonable adjustments,” but there’s no specific mandate for captioning at every performance. So the industry has largely treated accessibility as a nice-to-have funded by specific grants and goodwill, rather than as a baseline cost of doing business.
That’s the bit that should sting. The Smart Caption Glasses prove what’s possible. The fact that the technology has been concentrated at the National rather than rolled out across the West End, the regions, and the fringe is not a technical limitation.
It’s a series of decisions about funding, about priorities, about who gets to be a full participant in our cultural life and who gets fobbed off with a Tuesday matinee three weeks into the run.
Stagetext, the deaf community and brilliant access campaigners have been pushing this conversation forward for years. Producers and venues have made progress. But the gap between what’s possible and what’s standard practice is still vast.
Deaf Awareness Week isn’t about a hashtag or a tote bag. It’s a moment to ask uncomfortable questions of an industry that loves to call itself inclusive.
So here are a few questions worth thinking about:
Theatre exists to bring people together. It cannot keep doing that while telling a significant portion of its potential audience to come back another time.
The technology is here. The will is what’s missing. This Deaf Awareness Week, let’s stop pretending otherwise.
West End Wilma
If you’d like to learn more or support the campaign for better access in UK theatre, organisations like Stagetext and Attitude is Everything are doing vital work and welcome support.
You can filter London theatre shows by access performances on the homepage of westendwilma.com
