For much of the last half-century, the radio play occupied a peculiar position in the culture: respected, occasionally beloved, and almost universally assumed to be dying. It belonged to the era of the wireless set, of families gathered around a walnut cabinet, and it survived largely on public broadcasters' obligations and the loyalty of a devoted, ageing audience. Nobody expected it to become fashionable. Yet in cities from Mexico City to Manchester, something very like fashion is happening.
The evidence is scattered but persuasive. Audio drama commissions from independent producers have risen sharply. Established playwrights, novelists and screenwriters are writing for the form, often for the first time. Live recordings, in which actors perform scripts at microphones in front of an audience, now sell out theatres. And a new generation of listeners, raised on podcasts, is discovering that the pleasures of listening extend well beyond two people talking about the news.
Part of the explanation is technological. Binaural recording, which uses a pair of microphones placed inside a dummy head to capture sound as human ears perceive it, allows producers to create astonishingly vivid spaces on headphones. A door closes behind you. Someone whispers in your left ear. Rain begins on a roof above your head. Listening to a well-made binaural drama is less like hearing a story than like standing inside one, and for many younger listeners it is a revelation.
The theatre of the mind
But technology alone does not explain the revival. The writers now drawn to audio drama speak of the form's particular freedom. With no budget for sets or effects, a writer can move from a submarine to a ballroom to the surface of the moon in a single line. The listener supplies the rest. Imagination, the Mexican playwright Graciela Tovar-Lindqvist likes to say, is the only special effect that improves with every performance, because every listener supplies it fresh.
On a screen, I show you a face and you accept it. On headphones, you build the face yourself, and you never forget it, because it is yours.
Tovar-Lindqvist, whose twelve-part drama about a night-shift switchboard operator in 1950s Veracruz became an unexpected international hit, writes with a sound designer beside her from the first draft. She describes the process as closer to composing than to playwriting. Every scene is built around a sonic idea, the creak of a staircase, the hum of a transmitter, and the dialogue is shaped to fit the space the sound creates. Actors record together in one room, never separately.
There are commercial pressures, of course. Streaming platforms eager for cheap content have commissioned a great deal of audio drama that is really television without pictures, often starring famous voices reading scripts written for the screen. These productions tend to be forgettable. The best work, by contrast, is written for the ear from its first word, and it rewards the kind of attention few other forms still demand: eyes closed, phone face down, completely still.
Perhaps that is the real appeal. In a culture of constant visual noise, the radio play offers something rare: permission to stop looking. On a crowded train in Madrid recently, I watched a young woman in large headphones close her eyes, smile slightly and then, several minutes later, gasp aloud. Nobody around her knew what she had heard. That was rather the point. She was somewhere else entirely, and she had built that place herself.
