Dublin Theatre Festival 2025: The Sound Inside

The Sound Inside. Image Mihaela Bodlovic

***

In Adam Rapp’s critically acclaimed The Sound Inside, those who can do, those who can't teach. On the evidence of Bella’s only novel, she’s where she belongs teaching creative writing as a tenured Ivy League professor. The blind leading the blind as, by her own admission, she's not much of anything. Her unsuspected cancer the most interesting thing about her life. Mid-life, middle of the road, she’s fifty shades of grey, and not the sexy kind. Dark grey trousers, light grey shirt, mid grey cardigan with rolled up sleeves, she screams cloistered academia. Less a blank canvas so much as a bland canvas in love with the sound of her own literary ramblings. Recited like explanations of life. A woman for whom writing is reality. A superb Madeleine Potter making Bella's drudgery deeply engaging. Even so, Bella has her admirers. Most notably Eric Sirakian’s creepy freshman Christopher. A wannabe novelist with whom she strikes up an Oleanna style relationship. Not sexual so to speak, but still defined by the power an academic can have over a student, and vice versa. Leading to a big ask you don’t really buy, and a contrived ending as turgid as Bella's prose. All saved by a strong performance by Potter.

Like a washed out version of David Auburn’s Proof, The Sound Inside sees a famous academic and precocious student collide on the theme of death. James Turner’s dispersing mists and two chair set an innocuous background against which Bella delivers her one-sided conversation. Even when Christopher's speaking it’s still Bella. Or rather, Rapp, whose characters serve as mouthpieces in a modest tale of a modest academic who, like John Edward Williams' Stoner, lives a life most ordinary. Indeed, it’s not just its show-off, literary name dropping in which The Sound Inside plays half baked homage to literary academia, structurally it resembles some of its better fictional models. Skirting up to big ideas and big themes it doesn't appear able to handle. Cancer, euthanasia, suicide, plagiarism, fiction and truth. Referencing familial influences as if standing on the shoulder of giants, when in truth it appears dwarfed by them. Recording details drained of life and blanched to dull reportage.

Enthusiasts of stories about American academia, especially tales about professor and student relationships that border on the inappropriate, will likely enjoy Rapp’s second rate novella dressed up as a play. Steeped in America’s obsessive insecurity about its own literary significance. The work must be inevitable, Bella says. There's nothing inevitable about The Sound Inside. But Matt Wilkinson’s direction keeps it ticking along with enough to interest, if not necessarily intrigue the faithful.

The Sound Inside by Adam Rapp, presented by Pavilion Theatre, Pádraig Cusack & Half Moon Street Ltd, runs at The Pavilion Theatre as part of Dublin Theatre Festival 2025 until October 5.

For more information visit Dublin Theatre Festival 2025