What thoughts race around your mind on a sleepless night? The Nightline offers an unfiltered glimpse into the inner worlds of folks who find themselves awake in the wee hours, from angst about ageing parents to the thrill of nocturnal bird-spotting and the woes of broken hearts,
Alluringly peculiar, this immersive audio experience in Malthouse Theatre’s Bagging Room is the latest iteration of an evolving project created by renowned documentary theatre maker Roslyn Oades and ARIA Award-winning sound artist Bob Scott.
The Nightline review – quick links
The Nightline Concierge welcomes you to the after-hours
Upon arriving at the Malthouse Theatre, we are handed tokens marked with an image of a curly-corded telephone and quickly find ourselves handing off said tokens as we’re ushered out the back of the theatre into an alleyway.
We seem to have disrupted the solace of a woman taking a smoko break – she is perched on a milk crate, nonchalantly nursing a cigarette in one hand and a can of Guinness in the other.
However, this isn’t just any random worker taking a moment to herself, this is ‘The Nightline Concierge’. Performance artist Katia Molino embodies this authoritative figure with the stern, matriarchal presence of a senior librarian who would absolutely respond to rule violations with corporal punishment if she could still get away with it.
She leads us into a cavernous, darkened room where pulling our mobile phones out of our pockets can and will result in being expelled (and she really means it!). The room is filled with rows of small solitary tables illuminated by murky yellow light, and the audience is invited to take a seat, pick up the receiver of a vintage telephone, listen carefully and keep quiet.
Each table is fitted with an individual switchboard, and we’re invited to navigate between channels that play a curated collection of real-life voice messages.
A switchboard of Melbourne’s midnight thoughts
From shift-workers to insomniacs, truck drivers, prank callers, emergency workers, new parents and late-night revellers, the patchwork of audio clips captures a contemporary snapshot of the city’s subconscious.
While the current season is not the first iteration of The Nightline, this is not some mere recycled piece of radio theatre. For each new iteration of the work, Oades and Scott seek a new batch of local voice messages from the host city.
The artists put out a fresh appeal to Melbourne’s night owls, inviting contributions to their dedicated anonymous hotline – which was only open between the hours of midnight and 6am – via late-night radio call-outs, night-community networks, and business cards scattered throughout the city from the Malthouse foyer.
This season is also a homecoming of sorts, and not only because it’s in Oades’ home city. The Nightline has captivated audiences at the Sydney Festival, Adelaide Festival, Gold Coast’s Bleach* Festival and internationally at Canada’s Carrefour international de théâtre de Quebec. But originally, it was commissioned for RISING’s inaugural program in 2021 – only to be cancelled due to a pandemic lockdown on the festival’s opening night.Â
The Nightline’s long-awaited homecoming
Perhaps the knowledge of The Nightline’s long-lost Melbourne debut adds to the intrigue of this unconventional experience. The furrowed gaze of The Nightline Concierge – who seemingly sees all, even as she casually amuses herself with a book and playing cards – certainly adds to the playfully foreboding, sort-of spooky atmosphere.
Time seems to stop. It feels as if we’ve slipped into an alternate dimension, a shared hallucination, like a dream where you’ve been instructed to sit a surreal exam that makes no sense.
Between the hum of the phone lines, soft laughter occasionally echoes across the room as audience members overhear some of The Nightline’s more humorous confessions, along with the little clicks and clunks of audience members plugging into different channels of their switchboards.
There’s a slight sense of anxiety that comes with deciding when to switch between channels. More than 1000 messages were left before the season opened (and the message bank remains open to callers through to the end of the season). You’ll never get through all of them. But it still feels dismissive to cut off the meandering monologue of an old man in order to search of something more juicy.
Each visitor is having a unique experience, our channels occasionally synching up, our experiences united by the flickering of lights or the first lightning crack of a brewing storm.
The production is designed to strip away traditional theatrical spectacle, calling audiences to focus on a deeper kind of listening. However, this isn’t to say that the audio-visual experience isn’t state-of-the-art – grounded in Clare Britton’s production design with lighting design and coding by Fausto Brusamolino, and switchboard design by Greg Cameron.
Finding connection in the lonely hours
Whether intentional or not, there’s a stroke of genius to programming The Nightline this August – and it’s not just that the final month of the Melbourne winter has painted everyone with a contemplative shade of grey.
Downstairs in the Malthouse’s Merlyn Theatre, new Australian play Break of Day follows an underslept and overworked mother (played by Kat Stewart) through a grinding overnight factory shift and the hours surrounding it. Existing in a state of exhausted delirium, a snippet of her narration could seamlessly sit among The Nightline’s messages.
Next door at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, current exhibition Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry. offers a raw and reflective meditation on loneliness and the human need for connection. In harmony with The Nightline, the eclectic artworks on show offer glimpses into moments of vulnerability, isolation and longing.
Theoretically, you could visit the ACCA exhibition and see both Malthouse shows all in one day. A melancholic artistic bender of sorts, filled with excavations of human loneliness that might make you feel less alone, perhaps?
