Playwrights Create New Audio Installation for British Museum

Three leading playwrights and an award-winning poet have created a new audio installation for visitors to the British Museum, running until February 2023.

Anthony Anaxagorou, Hassan Abdulrazzak, Fin Kennedy and Nada Sabet were commissioned by the British Museum to create an in-gallery experience around new display Four Lives, which invites visitors to meet four individuals who lived in the interconnected world of the ancient Mediterranean over two thousand years ago.

The result, Eternal Telephone, imagines a hotline to the past in which long-dead characters can call visitors' smartphones and leave them a voicemail. These ten mini-monologues are accessed via a QR code in the gallery, augmenting the visitor experience by using theatrical techniques to bring the past to life.

The project was conceived and produced by Applied Stories, a digital production company making place-based audio drama, set up by the former Artistic Director of touring theatre company Tamasha, Fin Kennedy.

The characters who visitors will hear from include an Egyptian priest, the daughter of a mercenary soldier, a Phoenician merchant and Alexander the Great - along with other characters who speak to similar themes, such as a modern day refugee.

The professional cast includes Royal Shakespeare Company actor Waleed Elgadi, Gangs of London star Sammy Broly and Killing Eve's Jumaan Zizzari. Sound design is by Farokh Soltani whose theatre credits include the Papatango Prize-winning play Ghost Stories from an Old Country (English Touring Theatre, 2021) and the binaural COVID ward drama Under the Mask (Tamasha, 2020).

Fin Kennedy, Artistic Director of Applied Stories, said: "It's been such a pleasure researching these ancient lives with the specialists and curators at the British Museum, and fascinating to use our theatre and storytelling skills to bring the past to life. I hope visitors will feel a connection to them, and reflect that migration, assimilation and cultural appropriation are not just modern phenomena, but stretch back thousands of years."

Julia Farley, lead curator, said: "It's been incredibly exciting to work with such a talented team of writers to bring these stories to life. I hope that visitors will love this imaginative window into the ancient world. There is so much we don't know about the characters in the display, but the writers have given them back their voices, conjuring up stories of love, loss, family, and belonging that reach right across the chasm of the intervening two thousand years."

Eternal Telephone is free to experience and runs until 25 February 2023. The files can be listened to from anywhere, though are best experienced in the gallery itself.

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