Walkie-Talkie

Remember this list: Leicester, Melbourne, Tangiers, Lisbon, Antananarivo - the first cities in their countries to go into local lockdown. Now close your eyes and imagine entering your home. Associate each city with one object on your way to wash your hands. Leicester, your key is in the lock, Melbourne, you pick up an envelope, Tangiers, you enter the bathroom and turn on the tap. This is a Memory Palace: the act of remembering things by sticking them to locations you know. 

I was once told that this also works for how you remember your life: the more you live your life in different places, the more you remember of it. We must then leave our homes to make memories of our lives, even if we use them to help us remember what we don’t yet know. But how then to make memories when our world, locked down, became one location?

Faces on screens became our answer — but screens place us, sit us down and so make time forgettable, slipping into one long call, with one background. Returning to my family home in England for quarantine, I remembered this feeling of indistinguishable time from the long school holidays, and thought how my evening ritual of listening to tapes of Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter had provided these summers with a kind of rhythm. Even if my sense of what is in each chapter is shamefully off — having always heard these books from one nook of my bed — this memory of a voice in the almost darkness, and me alone in my imagination, led me back to look for listening. 

Gradually, a new cartography to my tiny world emerged, a cartography built by the sound of audiobooks, voice notes and radio plays, and alive with stories that were once confined to the space of my nook and the heavy tape player. Now, forever associated with putting my clothes in the wash, was the storming of the Bastille. The world gained its division and structure once again, and stories took on the fullness of memory.

‘Mr. Watson — Come here — I want to see you’, were the first words spoken on the first phone call, by one man in one room to another man in another. Their rooms were adjacent, and Watson, on hearing this, rushed in. By the 1930s, however (although exactly when is in dispute) callers no longer needed to share either a place or time, as the answering machine had been born. Now, as so much TV so excellently understood, an infinity of things might have changed by the time a caller’s message was received. 

The voice note, integrated into WhatsApp in 2013, but one of WeChat’s most popular features long before, turned these tables again. In the words of one journalist, it introduced a ‘walkie-talkie-like voice messaging feature’ where two people, in two unpredictable places could instantly talk to each other, but in their own time. In our shared solitude, at our social distance, this entrance into other lives — some audio equivalent to a ‘snapshot’ or a ‘glimpse’ — became the perfect medium for bringing people into my space, of hearing the intimacies of where they were, without any social difficulties to negotiate. 

If the voice note brought me much-missed voices —  with backgrounds of birds, running water, dogs barking, oil frying — the radio play brought theatre into my home via my phone. But this was something that the Edison phonograph had already promised it could do in 1906. More than a century later, the genre of theatre, so associated with seeing and with sweat, with watching together and watching each other, newly for me, became about listening on my own, in my home.  

The radio drama, like the record, is a form which we thought would be long gone by now, but it has so far survived its attempted executioners. Here, in our isolated spaces, it has again been given a new lease of life. Plays around the world, have been or will be broadcast that were set to be staged, and almost every day a new archived BBC radio drama appears on YouTube.

The one play that made its way into my headphones was By Heart by Tiago Rodrigues. I listened to it in bed, on my sofa and making coffee on a Sunday morning. It is a perfect balance between absence and presence: a recording of a drama, but one with an audience on stage learning a sonnet, interspersed with stories about other poetry learnt by heart. 

There is Osip Mandelstam, whose friends learn his poems after he is sent to the Gulag, Boris Pasternak who stands up in a Soviet Congress and sparks a mass recitation, and Cândida, a Portuguese cook and grandmother, who could never stop reading and who wanted to learn one book by heart before she went blind. But I remember these details also because I myself repeated them, reciting them by heart in the new place of the park, needing to tell someone a story who had just heard terrible news. 

The play will be on in Switzerland in October 2020, and so offers the promise of physical theatre in Europe once again. But would I want to see it, even if I could? Or will I want to stay in this world of voices, just like as a child I held out so long before seeing the Harry Potter films.

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(Katie Ebner-Landy is Associate Dramaturg at Dash Arts and is doing a PhD at Queen Mary )