Director Nick Fagan’s Holden Street Theatres production of The Sound Inside was a remarkable and absorbing piece of theatre. The play itself, written in 2018 by Adam Rapp, and nominated for multiple Tony Awards, makes a number of legitimate assumptions of the audience, principally that we are intelligent and have the ability to focus on thought-provoking and often densely worded dialogue. It also presumes a certain literary knowledge. Clearly the Holden Street audience met the expectations. We were held from the outset.
This two-hander concerns experienced Yale university creative writing professor Bella Baird (Micelle Nightingale), living with a disturbing medical diagnosis, and a highly intelligent and challenging student, Christopher Dunn (Benji Riggs). The play interrogates a range of critical human issues and conditions – literature, the act and art of writing, and the interface between literature and reality. Although primarily a play of words and thoughts, it reaches emotional depths and is confronting in the questions it asks, and the demands that one person can, in good conscience, place on another.
Michelle Nightingale and Benji Riggs were wonderful – entirely authentic and credible. They navigated their way through their often lengthy monologues with care and clear focus. Nightingale effectively moved in and out of the dual requirements of Bella’s role. She was in turn both narrator and a participant in the action. She was convincing, in the course of the action, increasingly revealed more of herself, culminating in her final extraordinary request. It was an empathetic yet forceful interpretation.
Riggs, too, was impressive. He made telling use of both his searching dialogue and the intense silences of the role. He convincingly carried the important load of meshing the two worlds: real life and the inner life of literature.
Together they succeeded with the audience. It’s rare and remarkable that, such was the piquing of our interest, that in the interval, the foyer was abuzz with conjecture about how Act 2 would unfold.
In all, this was an intimate and intensely engaging performance. The two actors successfully drawing us into the complexities of the plot with their subtle characterisation and intricate verbal exchanges. With a minimal set, our attention was rightly centred on the characters and the questions they raised, and left with us, after the final blackout.
