David Leddy's Susurrus

David Leddy’s audioplay should be available all year round at the Botanic Gardens as an alternative to the traditional audioguide that tells you about plants and trees. While not earth-shattering, Susurrus (“part radio play, part avant-garde sonic art, part stroll in the park”) can turn a wander through the gardens into a unique theatrical experience.

Like White Tea, Leddy’s new offering for 2009, Susurrus shows characters struggling to live in the shadow cast by a celebrated parent—in this case opera singer Robin Goodfellow, whose destructive, mercurial sexuality provides the motor for the plot. A re-worked Midsummer Night’s Dream unfolds in intersecting monologues, with Goodfellow as Oberon, his adopted son the Indian changeling. Bad news for the son, who never gets over some unusually intense family camping trips.

The script meanders dreamily, interspersed with an academic’s meditations on the decline of the urban sparrow population. Certain phrases weave through the text, spoken at some point by all the characters, tying everything to the sound of the wind in the trees (which is what 'susurrus' means), and giving the fractured monologues the feeling of a single incantation.

While the script is good, were it heard as a radio-play—or indeed read—it would be much less remarkable. What makes the play is the way the voices alter the garden, and are altered by it. You round a hedge and find yourself in a spot mentioned earlier by one of the characters, and it’s as if they've only just departed. Momentarily the Botanics become a mysterious, haunted place.