Written by Tom Powell

Directed by Elle While and Rachel Lambert

UK/2023/60mins

In 2021, the UK’s largest playwrighting prize allocated space for three winners in the industry’s toughest times. One of these (very) deserving three was Tom Powell’s The Silence and the Noise, a drama of two teenagers on the very edge of life. Now Powell collaborates with directors Rachel Lambert and Elle White to transition from the auditory into a hybrid production of cinema/theatre which, while filmed, carries with it the resonance and delivery of the stage.

A two-hander, the Papatango New Writing Prize-winning The Silence and the Noise was an audio drama concerning two teenagers and their coming-of-age trials, influenced by a third unseen role ‘Beetle’, an aggressive presence off-stage whose malicious actions impact Daize and Ben throughout. Their friendship is what captivates initially, their different experiences and backgrounds forging a steely alliance in their companionships, irrespective of differences. And though what initially connects them, a cruel and brutal familiarity with drug abuse; Daize’s mother a heavy user; and Ben a drug runner over the county line, is not what holds them together. As the world around them grows more dangerous, the pair who should have formed an expectant mistrust, even hatred, for one another instead become one another’s salvation.

Powell’s construction of language has a contemporary Shakespearian structure to the duologue nature of the piece. There is a continuous rhythm throughout, a bounce which retains the theatrical origins – creating a piece of media with the aesthetics of cinema but the tongue of the stage. This is not to say their voice is borrowed, indeed Powell’s writing is unique in the manner it brings theatre to wider audiences, spinning a twisted and delicate story of love and friendship with tremendous quality and humour.

Such whimsy and even nostalgia are crafted in The Silence and the Noise with its collision of the industrial and rural, its talk of drug abuses and violence, all framed with one scene – a disposed of leather sofa stashed away from the discussed action at the county line. A den, a safe space some will find a familiarity with, away from the troubles of everyday life where they meet their most trusted of friends. Elle While and Rachel Lambert’s direction is deliberately slow in moments, The Silence and the Noise has no big transitional moments and location changes outside of the time of day, and it works for the roots and intentions of Powell’s script where the language and performance are paramount.

Pacing is maintained with While and Lambert’s direction through the piece, with assistance from Billy Lambert’s composition to provide a gradually decaying track which fits the heightening tensions and anxieties of our leads, fluttering and offering flickers of optimism as they grow closer. Luke Collin’s work as director of photography maintains a presence on the screen, framed as a traditionally staged piece, with the audience directly in front without forced blocking or intrusive set-dressing. There’s intimate use of framing, unobtrusive – the audience is not so much punctuating into the conversations Daize and Ben have, but are an element of it. Though the stakes are heightened towards the peak of the narrative action, additional measures of urgency, carried through physicality and movement, could have conveyed more of the distress and threat to the element’s unseen similar to the piece’s tense opening.

But a tremendous amount of the piece’s success rests with leads Rachelle Diedericks and William Robinson and as compellingly poetic and brutal as Powell’s language is, Diedericks and Robinson’s performances secure much of the necessary connection with the audience to leap over the barriers which The Silence and the Noise set up by being part cinematic venture, part theatre. The pair’s interactions, though framed as cinematic, are performed with the more traditional zeal for the stage – and it’s heard in the cadence and projection Diederick and Robinson bring to the piece. Their evolving chemistry is what carries Powell’s words throughout, refraining from causing The Silence and the Noise to feel pretentious and slow for its cinematic elements, the lack of quick edits or transitions held together by the slow build of curiosity and character by the pair, who turn in excellently developing performances which quickly drive the audience to them.

In a time where the pickings of the ingenuity of theatre and film seem to have run dry, Pentabus and Rural Media’s creative exploration into the cross-section between the art forms – to discover where the two meet – leads to a triumphantly accessible, honest hybrid piece of remarkable quality and performance. An evolution of its auditory roots, The Silence and the Noise builds on what made it an award-winning drama and flourishes as a two-hander production, framed with just enough cinematic vision to find comfort in both mediums.