Something to sign about: Wendy Ebsworth interprets opera for the hearing-impaired.

It was an odd sight, that night at Covent Garden, but not inappropriate to the matter at hand. The opera was Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten--and there, stage right, was soprano Gabriele Schnaut, gesticulating operatically as the Dyer's Wife and competing with the orchestra for decibel honors. There, too, just a few feet away on the stage apron, was a slim, raven-haired woman in a long black dress, gesturing with even greater animation, eyes aglow and lips moving with soundless precision: the mute shadow, it seemed, of the woman making all that noise.

What was unfolding, it turned out, was a SLIP--Sign Language Interpreted Performance--and it posed certain obvious questions. Why, for example, would a performance with well-placed surtitles need to be signed? What exactly was the signer saying? And why, above all, would a deaf person take an interest in opera? "People are right to ask questions," says Paul Reeve, educational manager of the Royal Opera, which has offered signed performances of a handful of its operas every season since the reopening of the Royal Opera House in 1999. "Opera for the deaf--isn't that political correctness gone too far? But they're good questions to ask, if they lead to a real discussion of the issues." Reeve knows these issues well, having organized workshops for the deaf at the Royal Shakespeare Company and worked with English Touring Opera, which pioneered the notion of SLIPs for opera in the U.K. in the early 1990s. For most deaf people who communicate by signing, this is their first language; English (or whatever) is a second, learned later and most often not with ideal facility--the way American schoolchildren might learn Spanish or French. Studies at the Gallaudet Research Institute and elsewhere have shown that deaf people often read on a much lower grade level than the hearing. Following titles--which most often are situated on a different plane from the stage--can be daunting. What's more, they give no indication of who's singing, or of the emotional tone of what's being sung--things that a hearing audience can grasp automatically. "Surtitles are great as a backup for people who can hear," says Wendy Ebsworth, Schnaut's signing shadow at that Frau performance and the U.K.'s leading theatrical signer. "But they don't repeat, say who is saying what, when, how, why.... There are always gaps, and it's my duty to fill them in."

Ebsworth began her career as a social worker with the deaf and started interpreting in BSL (British Sign Language, which differs substantially from ASL, its American counterpart) in small theaters and for television. A decade ago, Welsh National Opera beckoned her for a special performance of Die Fledermaus in Liverpool, and she hesitantly agreed. Buoyed by its success, she accepted invitations from Opera North, then from English National Opera, to sign for their seasons. At ENO, one performance of every production--seventeen in the 2001-02 season--is signed, always with Ebsworth onstage. She's been with the Royal Opera's SLIPs from the start, too, signing Birtwistle's Gawain, in January 2000, and Der Fliegende Hollander, her first foreign-language opera there, a month later.

Though she was awarded an MBE (Member of the British Empire medal) in the Queen's 2001 birthday honors "for services to music," Ebsworth isn't a trained ...