Want intimate conversations with strangers in the night? Walk this way

A man about to have his leg amputated. A new father singing to his four-day-old baby. A jet-lagged aid worker fresh back from Yemen. A woman, the night her mum died, wanting to thank the nurses for their care.

These were all callers to The Nightline, a project created by Roslyn Oades with sound artist Bob Scott, which opens at the Malthouse Theatre next week.

At the show, each audience member has a rotary dial telephone and a metal panel with eight channels in it, like an old-fashioned phone operator’s switchboard. You can choose your own adventure, Oades says. “If someone’s talking … you can disconnect at any point and connect to someone else.”

She notes that the now obsolete rotary phones are far more conducive to listening than smartphones, the way their handle curves under your chin and the earpiece to your ear.

As well as the intimate call coming through the phone, the show features Scott’s additional layer of surround sound. It might feature a cluster of voices stating the time of night, a chorus of deep sighs and laughs or the sound of a giant storm coming in.

Oades sees nighttime as a world unto itself and is a regular visitor to it herself. “I’ve had issues with sleep since I was a teenager and continue to have patches where I have a very busy mind and kind of lock into being more of a night person than a day person,” she says.

“I went through a period of walking at night and there’s something about looking at the city lights at 3am or 4am. There are just a few lights on, like little lighthouses across the cityscape.”

She always wondered who else might be awake and what they might be doing. “The idea was born for this concept of how could I create an experience where we could just dip into all those windows and eavesdrop on those worlds,” she says.

About eight years ago, she decided to capture their experiences, setting up a dedicated phone line and getting the word out. Since then, she has had a few breaks but still looks forward to receiving new messages each morning.

People of the night are “an elusive breed” and largely invisible, she says. The best strategy for reaching them is via late-night radio, so she befriended several late-night radio hosts who helped let listeners know about the project.

Oades divides the callers into the visitors – insomniacs who can’t sleep, those whose minds won’t stop ticking over, those on a deadline – and those for whom the night is their natural habitat. “It’s a time for soul-searching for the visitors, and then for the people of the night, it’s like [an] alternative universe that they inhabit,” she says.

The Melbourne edition has been six years in the making. Originally commissioned by Rising in 2021, the show – and famously, the entire festival – was cancelled on opening night. Since then, it has travelled to the Sydney Festival, Adelaide Festival, Bleach Festival on the Gold Coast and to Canada. The collection has well over 1000 messages from people around the country, plus a whole collection in Quebecois French.

There’s something about the voice of a stranger on a phone line who has voluntarily left a message under the cover of dark anonymously, Oades says. What happens on The Nightline stays on The Nightline, she says – that’s part of its magic.

“I’ve been amazed by how open and authentic people are when they’re anonymous and it’s late at night. It’s a very open-hearted, intimate experience to receive these messages”

There does seem to be a unifying quality to many of the visitors at that time, Oades says. “I think it’s also because all the noise has gone, and the only person left is you. It’s that they’re soul-searching about their own life.”

The knowledge that you’re going to be listened to is important, she says, as is not being interrupted. That said, there is a real diversity to the calls. Some people become regulars, some even call every night.

One of Oades’ favourites is a garbage-truck driver from Warrnambool, who loves driving the streets at night, listening to Bruce Springsteen. “When he empties the garbage bins, he aims to put them back exactly how they were when he picked them up. So that when the people wake up in the morning, they’ll think, did those garbage men come?

“Everything you hear in the work was genuinely left by a stranger in the night,” Oades says. “Nothing is made up.”

The Nightline is at Malthouse Theatre from August 13 to 29.

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