“Listen to the sound inside”. It’s a sentence that suddenly occurs to Bella Lee Baird (Catherine McClements), or rather comes from her, unbidden, in a creative writing class that she herself is conducting.
It’s an exercise in automatic writing – the idea is to write continuously without ever lifting the pen from the page, designed to unlock the unconscious creative muse. It’s been 17 years since she published her one, politely received, novel, and if the sentence hardly constitutes a major work, it seems to be the key to something more significant. If only she could get this one student out of her head.
The Sound Inside is written by US playwright Adam Rapp, who is also a novelist and creative writing teacher at Yale. These distinctions seem vitally important here: the play is about a novelist who teaches at Yale – her name deliberately echoes his own mother’s maiden name of Baird. It’s a work not only deeply concerned with the art of the novel, it is itself steeped in novelistic structures and effects. It is a kind of masterclass in fiction – in particular the self-reflexive blend of the invented and the biographical known as auto-fiction – and as such constantly teases the audience with questions about what is real and what is not.
The plot is simple, yet it rather ingeniously keeps us on the edge. Baird is a fine, if possibly remote creative writing teacher, respected by her students but still a rather solitary figure. She tells us she lost her mother to a rare and devastating disease and is herself just beginning to come to terms with her own cancer diagnosis. One day, she gets a visit from one of her students, Christopher Dunn (Shiv Palekar). He is talented and highly observant, but also possibly dangerous. He is obsessed with Raskolnikov, the murderous anti-hero of Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment. The teacher and the student talk. A relationship develops. But something feels off-key, or maybe just unresolved.
At this point, a number of different things could happen: the play could dive into the salacious and the sexual; it could tilt into psychological thriller territory; it could drown in a sea of cheap sentiment. That it does none of these things is a mark of Rapp’s restraint and grasp of theatrical tension. This is a play steeped in lyrical descriptions, the kind of keen observational detail you find in literary fiction, but it is also taut and compelling, alive to the crackling potential of the stage.
As Bella and Christopher eke out a kind of understanding, as each finds in the other more than they find in themselves, a story emerges. A novella gets written. Whether it’s true or not doesn’t seem to matter all that much, although it may matter more than anything.
McClements is beautifully poised and thoughtful as Bella; she suggests an entire life lived, but also the ways she has shortchanged herself, the life she hasn’t lived. Palekar is excellent too, in a role that is deliberately more abstruse. He has a wonderful sense of his own possibility – that necessary arrogance of youth – but also mines a deep vein of melancholy, a sense of something unknowable to himself and to us. Sarah Goodes, such a fine director of actors, navigates the play’s shifting tones and textures with complete assurance.
It’s also beautifully designed (the set conceptualised by Elizabeth Gadsby and realised by Jo Briscoe), that authorial restraint reflected in the simplicity of the double revolve stage with a single lamplight. The actors spin around each other, viewing each other from multiple angles, as if searching for that three-dimensionality you look for in fictional characters. The falling snow is lovely, but it’s curious that the production that preceded this one in the Fairfax utilised the exact same effect. Paul Jackson’s lighting, with its bank of searchlights curving around the back wall, is wonderfully exposing.
The Sound Inside is a genuinely literary work – it wears its Ivy League tastes on its sleeve, constantly referencing “serious” writers, usually American, from James Salter to David Foster Wallace – and as such it is comfortable with ambiguity and irresolution. In one reading, Christopher Dunn might be a figment of Bella Lee Baird’s imagination; in another, she could be a figment of his. But then this is what fiction does: it takes true things and makes them complex and unknowable. Takes the unreal and makes it real.
It is a beautifully paced and ultimately deeply moving play, touching on subjects like loneliness and connection, grief and death, with the kind of delicacy and depth of a fine novel.
