The Sound Inside, at Dublin Theatre Festival, is a play of haunting power

The Sound Inside

Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire

★★★★★

There is something profoundly delicate about weaving together strands that feel personal and intimate yet resonate with all of us.

The resulting sense of timelessness is what gives Adam Rapp’s Tony-nominated play The Sound Inside its haunting power. Under Matt Wilkinson’s direction, the production never strays, keeping the tension tight, the pacing exact and the vision clear.

At its heart is Bella Baird, a Yale creative-writing professor whose life has been shaped by solitude and ruminations on what it means to create. Into her life comes Christopher Dunn, one of her students, a young man who appears strangely untethered from a world dominated by what trends on Twitter and Instagram.

Their connection unfolds slowly, not as a romance but as a dialogue between two people standing at the margins. Bella hesitantly admits she has few friends, that she tends her library with the devotion of a curator. In Christopher she recognises a fragment of herself, a reflection she cannot ignore.

The staging enhances this atmosphere of intimacy. The set, designed by James Turner, is pared down to two chairs against a stage that is almost empty. Elliot Griggs’ lighting bathes the stage in smoky glare and subtle shadow. The effect forces the audience to linger on every syllable. Gareth Fry and Fiona Sheil’s sound design provides jolts between scenes, separating realities, while urging us to look deeper.

These choices create the illusion of space collapsing and expanding, echoing Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the Chronotope, where time and place are never fixed but always in negotiation.

Beneath the surface the play wrestles with poignant questions. What does a writer truly seek: is it the pursuit of legacy; resonance with the audience; or that perfect moment when art feels supreme? At times the idea of art for art’s sake hovers over the play; it probes whether art mirrors society’s darkest recesses or is separate from the world’s materiality. What emerges is a push and pull, a web of questions without an easy resolution.

Madeleine Potter’s performance as Bella is remarkable in its precision and restraint. She carries the role with authority, her monologues layered with intelligence, irony and vulnerability. Opposite her, Eric Sirakian, as Christopher, is both enigmatic and grounded, his performance full of restless energy that complements Bella’s introspection. Together they create a dynamic that feels like different instruments playing the same score.

The Sound Inside never misses a beat. Its elegiac tone allows moments of laughter before pulling the audience back into silence and sighs. What lingers is not just the brilliance of the performances or the sharpness of the writing but the deeper provocation: the artist’s urge to break through the shackles of the everyday and truly listen to the sound inside.

Runs at the Pavilion, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Sunday, October 5th