Review: The Sound Inside

Bella, played with steely precision by Madeleine Potter, is a tenured professor with a terminal illness. Because she is very clever, she alludes to authors to describe her feelings and makes a rational decision to end her own life. And so, her fatalism is given emotional weight, despite her personal restraint.

Adam Rapp is a playwright who has read Aristotle’s Poetics and thinks that a good tragedy needs to include many of the philosopher’s features. Because he is very clever, he slips in a series of comments, through Bella, on the nature of writing. This deconstructs the obviousness of Aristotle’s structure and emphasises to the audience that Rapp understands post-modernism.

Post-modern architecture is vividly embodied in the contemporary shopping centre, which uses impractical adornments and false features to disorientate the consumer and give the impression of beauty and substance. It delights in the column that holds nothing up and the diversion that leads nowhere.

The Sound Inside is a post-modern tragedy that contains many features of ‘the tragic’ with a sprinkling of inter-textuality that, like a visit to the St James’ Centre, looks expensive and enticing, but is merely an expression of a late consumerism that lacks any emotional depth.