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The Nightline | Adelaide Festival 2022 review

At each table, the listener curates their own show, chasing the familiar or exotic as they plug into recorded Nightline messages.

Adelaide Festival 2022. The Nightline, at the Queen's Theatre. Picture: Tony Lewis
Adelaide Festival 2022. The Nightline, at the Queen's Theatre. Picture: Tony Lewis

The Nightline

Theatre | AUS

ADELAIDE FESTIVAL

Playhouse Lane & Gilles Arcade

Until March 20

It is 2.24am, and the woman on the phone says she can’t sleep. “There are so many things I want to do,” she says. “It’s been a while since I have been this restless.”

She is one of hundreds of people who have called The Nightline between midnight and 6am to help create an audio theatre production for the Adelaide Festival.

It is 11pm and audience members are led into a large space next to the old Queen’s Theatre filled with small round tables, each with a chair, an old rotary dial phone, and a desk lamp.

The concierge uses hand signals to indicate they should pick up the phone, and, like an old-fashioned country telephone exchange, plug in to listen in on any of eight lines.

Adelaide Festival 2022. The Nightline, at the Queen's Theatre. Picture: Tony Lewis, supplied
Adelaide Festival 2022. The Nightline, at the Queen's Theatre. Picture: Tony Lewis, supplied

They venture into the world of the night owls of Australia; the shift workers, their partners, tipsy ladies and prank callers, but most of all the sleepless; the intimacies of the ones who can’t sleep for the noise, the worry, the self-doubt or the crisis.

These have been collected by the project’s creators, Roslyn Oades and Bob Scott, at www.nightlineproject.com and turned into a restless experience stuck half way between performance art and theatre.

At each table, the listener curates their own show, chasing the familiar or the exotic as they plug into recorded Nightline messages.

Adelaide Festival 2022. The Nightline, at the Queen's Theatre. Picture: Tony Lewis, supplied
Adelaide Festival 2022. The Nightline, at the Queen's Theatre. Picture: Tony Lewis, supplied

As the trail of messages builds the whole space is turned into a sound and light show of night-time events. A huge truck passes, its headlights disturbing the scene. A storm builds and unleashes spectacular lightning and thunder. An early morning chorus of birdsong fills the air.

The audience has become the night owl, the eavesdropper for the anonymous callers looking for comfort or confession.

Having ensured their concerns are witnessed, we venture out into the night with our own consciousness enhanced.

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Original URL: https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/entertainment/adelaide-festival/the-nightline-adelaide-festival-2022-review/news-story/2d144f2cda8615fa2ead4f0dfc579737