This theatrical production is waiting for your call

A play that takes place entirely by phone seems made for these times. But Theatre on a Line, performed by Italian actor Roberta Bosetti to an audience of one, was conceived 10 years ago, in Melbourne, when we barely could have imagined today's pandemic.

The newly revived production has new relevance and potency.

“It’s incredible how it seems to have been written now; it’s almost frightening,” Bosetti says, via email from Italy. “We’ve only changed small things – a detail or a nuance. The reaction we are getting now for this production confirms that maybe when we did it for the first time it was ahead of its time. After 10 years, it’s the production that needs to be done.”

The idea is simple. An audience member, from wherever in the world, is invited to call a phone number. Bosetti answers, and so begins a conversation that is full of possibility and risk. Where will the conversation lead? How much should one reveal to a stranger?

Bosetti and her director husband, Renato Cuocolo, who together form the Cuocolo Bosetti/IRAA theatre company, are based in Italy but lived for many years in Australia.

The couple’s best known play was The Secret Room (2000). First performed in a terrace house in Carlton, to a maximum of 10 people, its action revolved around a meal cooked and served by Bosetti as she shared increasingly alarming details about her life. One was never sure what was truth and what invention. The Secret Room was performed 1629 times, in Australia and internationally, over the next 15 years. Works followed such as The Diary Project, part of the 2004 Melbourne International Arts Festival, in which they lived in the Arts Centre foyer for 16 days, reading scenes from their diary, and Private Eye (2005), performed to an audience of one in a hotel room.

Since returning to Italy in 2012 the couple has been living between Rome and Bosetti’s birthplace of Vercelli, a small town near Milan, in Italy’s north, an early epicentre of the pandemic. For two months they were in strict lockdown in Vercelli, leaving their house only to buy food and to bring their dog, Nuvola, a mischievous Bichon Frise, for walks.

“It’s been very difficult,” Cuocolo says. “Italy has been one of the hardest hit countries. Apart from the fear of getting sick, even worse has been recognising the fragility of our structures and our way of life – the things we thought were guaranteed forever. And yet there’s also beauty: silence, deserted cities and, slowly, slowly, we found within ourselves the capacity to react.”

Enforced isolation created the desire for meaningful connection. Bosetti prefers voice alone to the now-pervasive video call: she finds that the pure connection of a voice allows the imagination wider play in a richer, more mysterious, more provocative and strangely more intimate experience.