Mel

Mel is partially deaf and from the start of RUSH she has been troubled about her identity. To her, the Deaf world is a ghetto and she has no intention of getting trapped in it. Her way out has always been to choose hearing boyfriends and to develop her ability to function in the hearing world. In the first series she dealt with her own insecurity by hunting out weakness in others and exploiting them. Kelly was one of her victims.

Mel neglected her work at college, and when her teacher Michael tried to reason with her, retaliated by accusing him of sexual harassment. In series two, Mel had left college and was locked in a destructive relationship with Richard, a hearing boyfriend who beat her up. When we meet her again in series three, she is dealing with the after-effects of that violence.

'Mel faces a lot of problems in the Deaf community,' says Sarah Beauvoisin, who plays the part. 'She doesn't want to be deaf (which was very hard for me to understand). Mel drinks a lot and hangs around in the hearing community. She won't admit that she has a problem with her identity and with isolation.'

Mel is a spoken role, and Sarah says it is a big challenge to get the intonation and pronunciation right all the time, especially when Mel is being emotional.

Sarah's acting credits include Louis Neethling's short film Dis?able, a Channel 5 children's animation, Jay Jay The Jet Plane, Harrison Graham's production of The Dreamcatcher, the Graeae Theatre's children's play Message in a Bottle and a BBC Radio 4 solo drama, Nobody's Perfect. She has also taken the lead role in Interplay Theatre's Stepping Stones and Children of a Lesser God, for which she won an award.

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