The Sound of Silence

That’s the playful provocation at the heart of Small Mouth Sounds, a comedy set in the stillness of a nature retreat where a group of urban escapees attempt to find peace, purpose and maybe themselves… without saying a word.

With minimal dialogue and maximum emotional chaos, Bess Wohl’s award-winning play transforms silence into a symphony of human connection. Awkward glances, suppressed sobs and yoga-induced meltdowns take the place of witty repartee, becoming both painfully relatable and riotously funny.

For Co-Director Nathan Sibthorpe, who makes his Queensland Theatre Company mainstage debut with this work, silence is not empty space but rather the raw material of the production.

“There’s nothing like 350 people sitting in a theatre sharing a silence,” Sibthorpe says. “We all know how easily it could be broken – one voice, one laugh, one slip – yet it holds. That collective restraint is thrilling.”

In Small Mouth Sounds, silence itself becomes a character, thick with tension, ripe with comedy and brimming with possibility. “The silence cracks open the kind of dark comedy you can only find in live theatre,” Sibthorpe explains.

As co-founder and Artistic Director of Queensland’s leading experimental collective, Counterpilot, Sibthorpe has long explored the potency of sound in live performance, with several of the company’s 16 original works delivered to audiences through headphones.

That DNA is central to Small Mouth Sounds, which becomes QTC's first-ever binaural production – a “3D sound” experience, as Sibthorpe describes it. Every audience member will wear headphones, hearing the minutiae of the retreat with startling intimacy: the brush of bare feet on soil, the snap of a twig, the rustle of leaves, the quiet sigh of a stranger.

“Through this technology, we can feel like we’re immediately next to an individual crying in a sleeping bag,” Sibthorpe says. “It’s emotional ASMR – a live sound design that shifts our proximity and perspective in an instant.”

QTC's Director of Technical and Production, Daniel Maddison, says sound does more than amplify silence.

“As audiences, we’re already immersed in digital technology every day – it’s in our pockets, at our fingertips,” Maddison says. “In the theatre, our job is to use that same technology not as a distraction but as a doorway into something more profound.

“Binaural sound gives us the ability to whisk people away – to place them inside a forest, to have a bird call behind their shoulder, to let them feel a breath that isn’t their own. It’s a whole different kind of theatrical immersion and one that many audiences will have never experienced before.

The silence cracks open the kind of dark comedy you can only find in live theatre.

— Nathan Sibthorpe

“As Queensland’s state theatre company, we have a responsibility to embrace innovation and keep delivering experiences for our audiences that are thrilling, unforgettable and uniquely theatrical.”

Among the play’s most distinctive touches is its unseen leader, a retreat director who is only ever heard, never seen.

This disembodied voice becomes a unifying thread, guiding both the participants on stage and the people in the audience through the retreat, levelling the divide between performer and spectator.

“That shared experience is really important,” Sibthorpe explains.

“The audience isn’t simply watching a group of people on retreat. In hearing only what they hear, you are placed in the same position as them. You’re a fellow participant, bound by the same instructions, the same promises, the same mystery. You’re in it together."

That connection is both the play’s promise and its punchline. Each character arrives at the retreat carrying some kind of pain or trauma, hoping to heal in silence. Their inner turmoils become the unspoken soundtrack of the production, exposing the comedy and absurdity of constantly trying to better ourselves.

“It is delightfully awkward and strange, and very, very funny,” Sibthorpe says. “But it also sneaks up with some big existential questions. Who are we when we’re left alone with ourselves? What masks slip when there’s nothing left to say? And what happens when silence becomes the loudest voice in the room?”

The answers, it seems, are somewhere in the silence.