Rose Ayling-Ellis: ‘People didn’t think I could dance, and I did. So... why not Shakespeare?’

“The sign for Shakespeare is a ruff, like this,” says Rose Ayling-Ellis, sweeping both hands in semi-circles from the back to the front of her neck. “It’s important to do it that way round,” she grins, “the same sign from front to back means ‘velociraptor’.” She demonstrates in British Sign Language (BSL), adding a menacing finger waggle and a predatory snarl – before the catering table catches her eye, and she lights up, the way she did spinning in thrilling silence around the Strictly Come Dancing floor last year. “Oh! They’ve got Biscoff! I love these biscuits. Do you want one?”

We’re backstage at the Soho Place theatre, in central London, where the 28-year-old actor – who made her name playing Frankie Lewis in EastEnders before winning last year’s Strictly – is rehearsing for her role as Celia in Josie Rourke’s new production of As You Like It. Ayling-Ellis is accompanied by an interpreter to ensure she’s following my questions accurately, but she replies aloud with warmth and clarity, her face an open book.

“As a deaf actor, doing Shakespeare feels quite scary,” she admits. “But I feel like I get braver all the time. People didn’t think I could dance and I did, so… why not Shakespeare?”

The production marks Rourke’s return to directing after spending seven years as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, where she oversaw Phyllida Lloyd’s triumphant Shakespeare trilogy with all-female casts: Julius Caesar, Henry IV and The Tempest. Since As You Like It features the most songs of any Shakespeare play, Rourke commissioned new music (from Scottish composer Michael Bruce) and will have a pianist on stage, improvising throughout each performance.

“It’s a beautiful, feel-good story about people going into the forest and finding confidence in their true identities,” Rourke tells me. “And it’s about the positives we can find when the world stops for a bit.” Casting a deaf actor as Celia – one who will communicate in sign language throughout the play – was no act of tokenism. Rourke believes that Celia and Rosalind (played by Leah Harvey) have “maybe the closest female friendship in all Shakespeare. They are deeply in each ­other’s pockets and share a private language, which they sign to each other. We have subtitles so the audience can follow their conversations.

“And what happens when Rosalind falls in love with somebody else is that Celia goes through a period of being excluded from that friendship. Celia is present – but almost silent – in the two famous scenes where Rosalind and Orlando are deciding what to do. If Rosalind stops signing, she can exclude Celia from those conversations.”

“Exactly!” agrees Ayling-Ellis. “A lot of deaf people experience feeling left out. Feeling lonely. Celia is also left out by her father; she doesn’t really have a relationship with her family. That happens with a lot of deaf people. We get very close with the people who communicate best with us. That’s why it’s so painful for Celia when she feels sidelined by Rosalind. When we fall out with our close friends, it can hurt more than breaking up with boyfriends or husbands. The bond between female friends is special, very intimate.”

Born deaf into a hearing family in 1994, Ayling-Ellis makes a face when I ask her about her first encounters with Shakespeare at school. “It wasn’t something that appealed to me. I struggled a lot with English, with grammar. You write what you hear. Deaf people have to remember it and spell things out. That meant that when I was 10, I had a reading age of 14 and a writing age of six. I still feel insecure about my writing now, because I know I’m making mistakes. So when it came to Shakespeare? Nah!” She shakes her head.

“It’s only now I’m learning how beautiful it is. As we translate it into sign language, I can really feel it. He wrote using a lot of metaphors and sign language is very literal, so I’m using a mixture of BSL and theatrical signing called ‘visual vernacular’, which is expressive and easier for hearing people to understand.”

Although she has always had an extrovert streak, Ayling-Ellis didn’t do any drama at school. “That was for popular kids, and I wasn’t popular. I didn’t go to the theatre, either. I grew up in Kent and we didn’t have theatres with BSL or captions. I went to a pantomime once and it was quite entertaining, but I had no idea what was going on.”

She balked at the “stereotypical” deaf characters she saw in film and on television. “Deaf people always seemed to get run over. I mean, we can see cars. We don’t just stand around in the road waiting to get hit. It seemed that deaf characters were always victims. Interestingly, most deaf people on TV are female.” Playing into the idea of female vulnerability? “Exactly. You don’t see so many deaf men on screen, because people don’t want to associate men with vulnerability.”

Equally irritating to her were films “where the deaf person learns to sign or speak and everyone goes: oh, amazing! Like Children of a Lesser God [the 1986 romance for which deaf actress Marlee Matlin won an Oscar]. When I was born, Mum didn’t like that film because people would come up to her, ask her if she’d seen it, and say: ‘Your ­little girl’s going to be all right, she will be able to speak!’ She would tell them to go away.”

So Ayling-Ellis channelled her creativity into drawing. “I was interested in animation, so in my mid-teens I went on a National Deaf Children’s Society course for filmmaking. I found it so boring and technical. I realised I didn’t like film-making at all! So the other kids suggested I did some acting, and I completely loved it. It was a fun story about a spy school for deaf people and there was one spy in the school who was murdering people – it was quite good, actually!”

She remembers the pride she felt taking the DVD home to show her family. “My mum was like, ‘Whoa! You can actually act.’ The guy who ran that weekend then asked me to be in a short film, and things rolled from there…”

Had she been born five years earlier, she would not have been so lucky, she says. “This was at a time when diversity was starting to become… I don’t want to say ‘a trend’ but… yeah, that’s what it was. I wasn’t able to go to drama school. Agents didn’t have deaf actors on their books. So people were advertising on Facebook and that’s how I applied for jobs. I did it all myself.”

Although she sounds upbeat about it now, she looked close to tears describing her early career in this year’s MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Festival. She spoke of losing early theatre roles to hearing actors when companies realised that working with her might require a little extra effort.

She credited EastEnders – in which she became the first long-term deaf character – with “en­abling me to grow and develop my skills as an actor”, but working with scripts written by hearing people was often “frustrating”. It irked her when her character was put “in a room with a big group of people arguing with each other, following everything that is being said and even repeating things back to them [… ] or they will write my character as lipreading someone from impossibly far away – like I have a superpower”. On set, Ayling-Ellis would try to make things more realistic, only to find the original version coming out of the editing room.

Today, she tells me that delivering that lecture “was the most scary thing I have ever done because it was opening up myself… being honest about the problems. I knew it could go either way: I could get more opportunities or destroy my chances, because people would be so scared of working with me.” She shrugs. “What actually happened is that the people who really want to work with me came forward, understanding me better. Those people who wanted to work with me to make them look better? They’d be too scared now!”

On Strictly, in the awed arms of Giovanni Pernice, she won the nation’s hearts – and hopes that she “showed deaf children and the parents of deaf children that anything is poss­ible”. During a dance to Clean Bandit’s Symphony, they invited viewers into the deaf world by cutting the music for 10 seconds. Heat magazine named it “the Unmissable TV Moment of the Year”, and Bafta made Ayling-Ellis breakthrough artist of 2021. The BSL Courses website has had a 2,844 per cent increase in sign-ups for their free trial training. A generation of young deaf people saw a glass ceiling smashed.

“I started off finding dancing very confusing,” she tells me. “It was a strange new skill. But Giovanni was so good. He listened and learnt a lot from me. We learnt very quickly that, if we were together, I could follow him. If he left me alone, it was much harder for me to be on time. He had to arrange the ­choreography so that I could see him all the time. That took time. If you look at week one, you can see he wasn’t always in my line of sight, but by the end, he always was. It was a wonderful experience. It gave me courage.”

But it wasn’t all easy. Ayling-Ellis has said she found the sudden attention quite challenging, and broke up with her boyfriend amid the ­pressure. Like the characters in As You Like It, she had fallen in love with him almost at first sight.

“I felt, from the start, like I had known him for a very, very long time… if that’s part of what ‘love at first sight’ can mean?” But she doesn’t want to discuss her private life in the press any more, because “if I do that then I can’t switch off when I go home. And I’d rather talk about my career, because I am really proud of it. I’m proud of the hard work and I’m so glad I am deaf, because it gives me a purpose. I want to build the ladder and climb up it and leave it behind me for ­others to follow.”

She’d like to see more deaf people in audiences as well as on the stage. But she says theatres still have work to do to make the experience more accessible. “I went to see The Doctor at the weekend,” she says. “Fantastic play! But the captions were so far to the side of the stage, I was constantly twisting my neck, choosing between watching the actors or knowing what they were saying.”

She compares the experience to a recent trip to the National Theatre, which offers hi-tech subtitle glasses. “They were a bit heavy on my nose, but I was free to look where I wanted. I could watch a new character who’s walked on stage while still keeping up with what the other characters are saying. I loved that. But they’re not really advertised clearly, so deaf people don’t know about them – and they don’t go.”

Ayling-Ellis also notes that we have hardly seen the number of deaf actors on TV surge since she gave her speech. “I’m not expecting a lot of change. It’s a slow process. We’re going to have to work on it, keep the conversation going.” To that end, she’s planning a career in executive producing and has assembled a group of fellow creatives to work on a sitcom “about the full range of people in the deaf ­community. People using sign and speech and translators… all sorts. Because we are funny. Signing can be funny… we do Donald Trump as a flappy wig!” She lifts her palm about her head. “Although not the people who voted for him. You can always tell the people who like him, because they do the finger-spelling sign instead.”

And her dream role? “Oh! I would love to be in a film where a crowd of people walk into a room – and I beat them all up. I’d love you to see me flying through the air and kicking somebody in the face! Can you imagine, Rose from Strictly breaking bones! I want to play a badass.” You have been warned.

As You Like It is at Soho Place, London W1 (sohoplace.org) from Dec 14 to Jan 28