The Sound of My Voice

In this incredibly resourceful adaptation of Ron Butlin’s 1987 novel, Glasgow’s Citizen’s Theatre group provide a beautiful yet unbearably intense take on the story of a troubled-but-functioning alcoholic. Morris, a biscuit company executive with an all-consuming addiction to drink, lives his life according to the most delicate of balancing acts, barely keeping his job, his family and his mind intact.

The whole production is watertight. Billy Mack is outstanding in the lead role, swaying and squinting, careering from corner to corner, flashing from infantile drunk to suave professional to sensitive, self-loathing family man with ease. He looks each and every audience member dead in the eye, adding an accusatory weight to Butlin’s second-person narration. Michele Gallagher, meanwhile, is the ideal every-purpose supporting actress, applying just the right amount of restraint to her minimal representations of Morris’s long-suffering wife, naïve children and insincere, patronising workmates.

In the book, the sensory distortion of withdrawal symptoms is described in turn as drowning in mud, a desaturation of colour, a total loss of equilibrium on a choppy sea; here, thanks to some masterful lighting that flickers between sickly ochre, steely grey and harsh, white strip-lighting, it is captured to arresting effect. It’s all brought together against a mirrored backdrop that provides a strikingly simple metaphor for Morris’s inner conflict, and a soundtrack — mixing Brahms, Dvorak and harsh, everyday noise — that’s constructed and cued with precision.

In condensing Butlin’s narrative into just one hour, Jeremy Raison surpasses the challenge of conveying the novel’s devastating potency – if anything, here it is only intensified.