★★★★★
A woman stands beneath an illuminated streetlamp beside an empty park bench on Yale University’s campus. It is the middle of the night and she cannot sleep. Dressed in the yellows and browns of an academic, or possibly Velma from Scooby-Doo, Michelle Nightingale’s Bella Baird is alone but never experiences silence. Her inner monologue keeps talking.
This is The Sound Inside.
Adam Rapp’s intimate two-hander, presented by Holden Street Theatres, explores the voice within us and the things we use to escape it. Books, phones, sex, work and other people can distract us, but the mind is a persistent narrator. It examines our lives, rewrites our memories and sometimes convinces us that its bleakest interpretation must be the truth.
Bella is a successful novelist and Yale creative-writing professor whose home is filled with books, including treasured first editions. Christopher Dunn (Benji Riggs) is a precocious, combative student who arrives at her office without an appointment and immediately violates the usual boundaries between teacher and pupil.
Both have become misanthropes. Christopher rages against peers who lose themselves in the endless scrolling of their phones, describing social media as a form of “mental syphilis”. Bella largely agrees. Her longer historical view, however, recognises that the urge to escape ourselves is not new. Before we disappeared into screens, we disappeared into novels.
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment becomes a recurring presence. It is ostensibly a novel about murder and morality, but Rapp is more interested in the voice that follows Raskolnikov afterwards. The act is completed. The mind refuses to let it end.
Bella and Christopher are drawn together through this shared compulsion to read, interpret and create. Director Nick Fagan describes the play as resembling “a novel being written in real time”, and the production embraces that structure. Bella narrates sections of the action between passages of dialogue, moving between participant, author and unreliable interpreter of her own life.
Christopher is also writing a novel. His emerging work draws upon his encounters with Bella, his autobiographical history, his inner monologue and the books that have formed him. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is not simply his favourite novel. Christopher calls it “his planet”, an admission containing both devotion and danger.
Living within somebody else’s imaginative world can expand your own. It can also colonise it.
Bella’s debut novel enters Christopher’s literary bloodstream alongside Dostoyevsky and Wallace. Rapp uses their conversations to examine the creative process without pretending that influence can be neatly separated from appropriation. Writers borrow plots, rhythms, ideas and structures from other writers. People do something similar. The voice we call our own contains parents, teachers, lovers, enemies and every book that has rearranged the furniture inside our heads.
Fagan allows this literary density to breathe. That places an enormous burden on its two performers. Nightingale and Riggs meet it.
Their American accents are remarkable, but the deeper achievement is their command of Rapp’s dense, precisely paced text. Neither performer makes the language sound memorised. Ideas appear to form in the moment, even as passages of narration demand the control and musicality of spoken prose.
A particularly funny sequence finds Bella narrating a one-night stand with a hairy middle-aged man whose bad back dictates the rhythm of proceedings. His cautious thrusting resembles very small objects travelling along a production line. Nightingale describes the encounter with the emotional distance of a researcher documenting a minor industrial process.
The laughter also exposes Bella’s predicament. She has tried to silence the sound inside with another body. Even during sex, she cannot stop narrating.
Riggs gives Christopher the abrasive confidence of a brilliant young man who has learned enough to become contemptuous but not enough to doubt his contempt.
The performers’ chemistry has foundations. Nightingale and Riggs previously worked together in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and their trust is visible in the rhythm of these exchanges.
Fagan’s direction and design keep the physical production restrained without making it static. A few carefully selected pieces establish the lonely Yale square, Bella’s office, a restaurant and her apartment. Martin Smith’s lighting design, supported by Charlie Dippy’s lighting and sound operation, redraws the space around them.
The streetlamp isolates Bella in the darkness. Warmer light turns the same stage into dinner at a restaurant or Chinese takeaway at home. Heather Jones’ costumes reinforce the contrast between Bella’s curated academic identity and Christopher’s more agitated presence.
These transitions are seamless enough that the production maintains the forward movement of a psychological thriller. The twists are best left undisclosed, although audiences confident they have solved the play early may find their own inner narrator is not as reliable as advertised.
Holden Street Theatres’ production includes an interval, while Rapp’s original 90-minute structure does not. Ordinarily, interrupting a work dependent upon accumulating tension would be a substantial reservation. Here, the break arrives at an effective cliffhanger.
Modern audiences are accustomed to consuming psychological drama in 40-minute episodes rather than 90-minute marathons. More importantly, the interval gives everyone time to speculate over drinks. The theories continue in the foyer. Most will be proven wrong.
Beneath its games with fiction and reality, The Sound Inside is concerned with connection and the difficulty of being known. Bella and Christopher try to escape themselves through each other. The complication is that another person cannot permanently silence the mind. At best, they can introduce a different voice.
Death appears to offer the only complete reprieve from the sound inside. We did not possess an inner monologue before birth and apparently managed without one. Why, then, do we fear returning to that silence? Because the inner voice fears its own extinction most of all.
It will make arguments for survival, but it can also deceive us. It can insist that hope has disappeared when we have merely lost sight of it. Bella and Christopher are both intelligent enough to examine their lives relentlessly. Neither is necessarily wise enough to recognise when examination has become entrapment.
We are frequently warned about the dangers of avoiding our internal lives. Mindless scrolling diminishes attention. Constant stimulation prevents reflection. A society unable to sit with discomfort cannot understand itself.
Rapp presents the other danger. In a world riven by overlapping crises, spending too much time alone with the voice inside can produce despair, cynicism and the belief that isolation represents superior insight.
Nick Fagan’s South Australian premiere holds existential darkness, literary ambition and vicious humour in careful balance. Nightingale and Riggs make a demanding text feel like an intimate, unpredictable conversation unfolding for the first time.
Perhaps theatre offers a happy medium. We sit together in the dark and listen to other people turn their inner lives into outer monologues. For a while, the sound inside our own heads has company.
The Sound Inside is presented by Holden Street Theatres and runs to 29 August in Adelaide. Holden Street Theatres, 32 – 24 Holden Street Hindmarsh SA 5007.
Tickets are available here.
Website: https://www.holdenstreettheatres.com/the-sound-inside
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/holdenstreettheatres/
Photo credits: Leo Hiraga
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