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Brisbane's inner-city voice since 2014
Brisbane's inner-city voice since 2014
Co-director Bridget Boyle on Queensland Theatre's silent comedy, where every audience member wears headphones and the smallest sounds become the story.
The first thing co-director Bridget Boyle noticed at Tuesday night's preview of Small Mouth Sounds was not on the stage. It was the audience.
"It was so great to see them, everyone leaning in and just so, so still," she says. For more than 90 per cent of the room, she estimates, it was their first show with headphones, and the effect was exactly what she hoped for. "You feel like the show's being performed just for you."
Queensland Theatre's production of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Bess Wohl's comedy opens officially tonight at the Bille Brown Theatre. It follows six strangers on a five-day silent retreat, each arriving in some kind of agony and looking for something to change. They never see their teacher, a guru with a podcast. They only hear her, through the sound system, starting with a ridiculous but poignant story about frogs journeying to see the ocean.
Every audience member wears headphones, and the cast wear concealed microphones, so the grunts, the stifled sobs and the rustle of a tissue packet are heard as if they are happening beside you. Much of the sound is recorded with a microphone shaped like a human head, which captures sound the way our bodies hear it. In the woods scene, Boyle says, mosquitoes and birds seem to circle behind the audience, and people visibly jump.
"This is the very first time that this particular play has been performed with headphones," Boyle says. Wohl's play was first produced off-Broadway before the pandemic and has since been staged widely, including at Darlinghurst Theatre Company in Sydney in 2019. The headphone version came from Queensland Theatre artistic director Daniel Evans, who suggested it to Boyle and co-director Nathan Sibthorpe. Wohl gave her permission. It is the state theatre company's first binaural production, and Evans says the headphones bring audiences "remarkably close to the action."
Sibthorpe is artistic director of Brisbane collective Counterpilot, which builds the audio experience. Lighting designer Christine Felmingham and composer and sound designer Mike Willmett are part of the collective too. For Boyle, a comedy director, it was new ground. "Every project that I do, I want to be able to stretch myself as an artist," she says.
"Comedy is my jam," says Boyle, and the play gives her plenty to work with. There is physical comedy, she says, though not slapstick, and a lot of humour in the encounters between people who cannot speak. Props become characters. A passed tissue packet crinkles like a small song. One retreatant wears so many beads and bells that his arrival is announced before he walks in.
The cast produce much of that sound live on stage, an approach she compares to foley. They also perform with in-ear monitors so they can hear the soundscape they are part of. The company built it up in layers: blocking first, then microphones and in-ears, then the live sound, then the soundtrack, and finally the set and lighting in the last week or so. Isabel Hudson's set features a cabin that Boyle describes as "like a little tiny home". "There's a bidding war amongst the workshop for who's going to buy it and take it home after the show," she laughs.
But the play is not only funny. At the preview, she says, an audience member turned to her in tears. "For me, all of life is in this play." Boyle sees a fine line between comedy and tragedy, and says the play sits on it. Its message, as she puts it, is that life is really, really hard, but we are not alone. The characters meet as strangers. Nobody leaves with everything solved. But each encounter changes them a little, and things get somewhat easier.
Boyle hopes the audience takes away theatre they have not had before: the closeness of a film close-up, inside a room that feels immersive. She also hopes they leave with some hope. Her pitch to the unconvinced is simple: your ideas about what theatre can be, she says, can hopefully be changed and exploded and expanded.
She is also pleased to see the state theatre company programming such a range, from the big, familiar Pride and Prejudice, which she co-directed with Evans earlier this year, to a play and a style that have rarely been seen in Queensland.
Images: Queensland Theatre.
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