Tape Delay from
The Truth was another excellent audio play that used the medium to its
fullest. It’s difficult to imagine such
a play being written, or indeed being produced with such effortless naturalism,
even five years ago. It explores themes
of technology, relationships, and perception and makes one empathize both with
its “victim” and with its “perpetrator,” doing so much more successfully than a
somewhat similar tale on BBC Radio 4 a few months ago, My One and Only by Dawn King.
My One and Only used
only phone conversations and recordings (and one “video” recording “heard” on
radio) to tell a story of obsessive relationship between Noah and Layla. This imaginatively included voice messages,
conversations, and not only on mobile phones but between, for example, Layla
and her workmate on an inbound line. The
moral of the story was that although Noah perpetrated the stalker-ish behavior,
Layla, in a twisted way, actually enjoyed and encouraged it.
The characters in Tape
Delay are more innocent. Jonathan Mitchell
has written, at 20 minutes, a somewhat shorter tale than My One and Only. It concerns
Ben and Erica, meeting for a first date, only for it to fizzle out before they
even speak face-to-face. Ben
accidentally records their conversation and finds himself, afterwards, piecing
it together, cutting it up, and re-editing it, in an attempt to figure out what
went wrong. After an unspecified amount
of time during which Ben has a fantasy relationship with Erica’s recording, he
calls her back, only to learn that she is at least as culpable as Layla was in My One and Only.
The performances from Ed Herbstman and Tami Sagher are very
good, and the play, recorded on location in New York City, is extremely
well-produced. I really enjoyed this
look into controlled madness. The Truth
is comprised of some very talented people, and I will definitely be listening
to more of their output.
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