Romcoms rely on cheeky dialogue or exposition-heavy confessionals with best friends to get inner monologues across, but Silent Disco from Pique Theatre, at Gilded Balloon Teviot (Turret), gives you, the audience, access to this inner world in real time.
We start with a meet-cute: Lucy is a psychologist with a passion for literature, and Nicholas is a musician with a passion for music. We hear how she admires that he blushes at her and then later begs him to stay with her. He says ‘I love you’ first, asks her to move in early, and even gets close to proposing at an inappropriate moment. They fumble around each other as any young people do when they’re in love but haven’t yet confronted the messiness of another person. That messiness becomes quite intense as well. Lucy has severe mental health struggles, and Nicholas abuses drugs and falls in with the wrong people. To write more would be to reveal too much of the plot but consider this a trigger warning.
Silent Disco has a fascinating technical premise, too. The audience wears the classic multichannel headphones from silent discos, which allows us to switch between the Red and Blue channels to listen alternately to the characters’ inner monologues. These include flashbacks, remembered conversations, and hallucinations, among standard inner-monologue conventions.
While the show has a unique concept, it fails at a few points. The voices in the headphones are supposed to be the inner world of the characters, but with the headphones on, it is difficult to hear the actors onstage despite the intimacy of the small venue. It would be helpful to mic the actors and mix their voices into the headphones, then remix their inner monologues with slightly different sound; or mix them to external speakers, as there are pre-recorded characters who are sometimes projected through external speakers. There are also several long pauses onstage, which look like moments when the inner monologue should be going, but often it does not.
It might work better for the inner monologues to be more relentless, a greater part of the show compared to dialogue. Further, there were points where the actors’ lines did not fully line up with their inner worlds, which is simply a choreography issue: the performers were naturalistic, but they need stricter timing. Finally, the narrative itself and the simplicity and beauty of the performances onstage mean that the script simply doesn’t need this access to inner monologue. It doesn’t add anything. There are moments where it might, like hallucinations, but this was not developed fully enough.
There’s a lot of great experimental material here, so for the technologically curious, check out Silent Disco at Gilded Balloon Teviot (Turret).
Listings and ticket information can be found here
