Adam Rapp’s Ivy League thiller ‘The Sound Inside’ is a noir-ish campus mystery that was nominated for a hefty six Tony Awards upon its 2019 New York run – it now makes its UK debut at the Trav in a rare instance of the Broadway to Fringe transfer pipeline.
The lean 85-minute play largely concerns Bella (Madeleine Potter), a lecturer in English at Yale, whose past contains a well-reviewed novel and whose future looks pretty bleak: she has recently discovered that she is riddled with ‘a constellation of tumours’.
Her present largely consists of repetitive getting on: she has failed to write a second novel, stung by the commercial failure of the first, and lives a twilight single life with no real friends and no real attachments… until she becomes intrigued by Christopher (Eric Sirakian), an eccentric but gifted young man in her Dostoyevsky class.
He starts dropping by to talk to her during her office consultation hours, much to her initial bemusement, even irritation. But as she becomes intrigued by his eccentricities – mysterious past, total distrust of the internet and electronic devices – she’s drawn to him and pleased by the rapid progress of his debut novel.
Rapp’s play perhaps works best on a symbolic level, as we consider what the waxing and waning relationships – personal and creative – between Bella and Chriostopher actually mean. Not to spoiler excessively but the whole thing ends up in much darker territory than a classroom, but it has a chic otherness to it that casts reasonable doubt over how real this all is, as it wanders into entcingkly metaphysical territory.
Matt Wilkinson’s minimal production and inky stage – on which Elliott Griggs’s lighting does a lot of the heavy lifting – sets the right, vaguely existential tone for the whole thing.
Beneath that chicness, it can be thin. I found it burdened with tropiness: both Christopher’s off-the-grid loner and Bella’s middle aged woman with no family or friends feel like fairly off the peg character types that deserved more to them, even if they wind up at the heart of an enticing story.
Further, it has the whiff of a Broadway celebrity vehicle to it: tiny cast, very short, with the focus heavily stacked towards a single character. This worked out fine on Broadway: as Bella, Mary-Louise Parker won a Tony, job done. Potter is good, but without a big name draw, the play’s terse running time and the fact Bella has at least three quarters of the lines leaves it feeling lopsided and stacked towards a star who isn’t actually present.
It’s still an intriguing little thriller but it feels decontextualised by this new staging, its failings exposed.