Relative Sonics: On Storytelling, Ghosted Speech, and Theatrical In-Betweenness

Relative Sonics marks the debut of playwright and director Mingming Liu.

Created by an all-Chinese team of theatre-makers, it tells a coming-of-age story about the first generation raised online.

At its heart is the tender yet fractured relationship between Edison and Erica, two teenagers growing up in the glow of webcams, message boards, and the early internet. As they navigate love, identity, and the slow drift apart, the figure of Thomas Edison—the man who first trapped a human voice in tinfoil—haunts the narrative like an echo across time.

https://www.theatre-news.com/news/UK/120035/Relative-Sonics-premieres-at-Camden-Fringe-2025

Playwright & Director: Mingming Liu

Cast: Yudun Wang& Alina ZhouSound Designer: Jacky JiaoLighting Designer: Zidi WuAnimation Designer: Cola Le FangProjection Designer: LJStage Manager: Hongrui YaoProducer: Hannah Ieong Ka Man

Review starts here:

（中文滴在后面，你可以点我带你去）

As a cultural researcher, theatre is not the cultural form I am most familiar with. But I am captivated by the interferences among multiple subjectivities—particularly the dynamic relationships within an in-between state (the “subjects” here include actors, audiences, visuals, and sonics).

For me, the charm of theatre lies in how it treats the matter on stage as both an individual and as a speaking subject, only to return to the essential fact of being an object of the gaze.

These roles, identities, and perceptions coexist in the opened space of the theatre.

The stage is not a sealed-off container. It extends into the body, gaze, and affect of the audience.

All energy waves—the actors’ breath, the pulse of the air in the room, the hesitations and clashes of speech—become part of the drama.

Small spaces, then, feel intimate to me. Low-budget productions don’t feel out of place—because I can hear the breath of communication between actors, see the shimmer of tears in their eyes, the trembling of lips, or the tension of breaths exchanged.

We are granted a direct glimpse into their hesitations, their stories.

The moment Erica says “Edison” for the first time, the entire narrative unfolds.

The Storytelling

The actors are both protagonists and storytellers. The audience becomes a reader of an auto-ethnography (a diary, in a less confusing way).

The subjectivity and objectivity of the characters are exposed simultaneously. Those half-spoken sentences, shouted names, and incomplete emotional confessions are authentic expressions of fragmented desire to speak. These expressions are half-revealed, half-contained—a form of leaving space（留白）, inviting viewers to reflect, to supplement meaning on their own.

This leaving space（留白） is, in itself, an empowering structure:a cultural gesture that rejects a singular, unified subjectivity. (I will expand on this later.)

In this dual narrative, I was especially moved by the shifting dominance between the two characters. They sit on two red cubes—approaching, retreating, folding their bodies,

releasing tension. Language vacillates between comfort and confrontation.

The “modern” Edison carries a restless vitality. His words seem plentiful, but are mostly reactions.

He is fluent in the language of the world (social media), instinctively drawn to the word “individuality” (he likes the “uniqueness” within ppl), yet beneath his social outlook, his burning heart might remain untouched,even by himself. He doesn’t quite know what his body wants to do to feel at ease.

Erica is different. She is refined.

Carefully shaping her rhythm of speech: reserved, sharp, determined, stubbornly, endearing. It’s not that she doesn’t want to express herself, it’s that she refuses to be easily represented. She distrusts the idea of media offering complete representation, and questions the relationship between platforms and fragments.

She feels that there’s only a thin line between people loving her and doubting her and this thin line defines how she approaches intimacy. She believes in a more primitive, intuitive connection: intense, yet fragile.

This vulnerability is, in fact, part of her subjectivity.

At this point, as we revisit the historical narrative juxtaposed against theirs:the voice

recording of “the real inventor” Thomas Edison and his wife. We seem to hear the echo of a haunted female voice.

That earliest recorded woman, a mother, a wife, a fragment,refuses to be framed by the phonograph.

She wants to be truly heard. (Just as an actor on stage wants to be truly heard.)

The overlay of time and space in the play builds a peculiar structure:

From a modern YouTube clip to a 19th-century phonograph, from contemporary media representations back to the earliest technical recordings:

Voice becomes a battleground for Subjectivity.

Within the sound design, the audience may detect subtle metaphors and conceptual hints.

Most stories of intimacy attempt to touch upon wider sociological questions, this one does too.

It makes us realise: in this media-saturated world, we are surrounded by fragmented content.Every voice may be chopped and uploaded, becoming the ghost of an incomplete self online.

Every recorded moment may echo through time, turning into a representation that no longer belongs to the one who originally spoke.

This is an aesthetic dilemma about being heard.

And a cultural exercise in locating one’s true subjectivity within fragments.

The Haunted/Ghosted Voice:

It makes me think of a concept that I was once obsessed with: Hauntology.

First coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1993 in Spectres of Marx.

A portmanteau of “haunting” and “ontology,” it describes a state that belongs neither to the past, present, nor future.

The ghost:something gone yet still present—interrupts reality with a lingering temporality.

In media and cultural studies, particularly within sound, image, and technological reproduction, hauntology addresses a central question:

When humans are recorded, represented, and disseminated through technology, does subjectivity become fragmented—floating between history and machinery, like a ghost?

Is the thing being represented haunted—by the subject of the past and the unrealised

future?

Within this context, the historical narrative in the play becomes especially significant.

It imagines a fictional conflict between Thomas Edison and his wife, illustrating the tension between subjectivity and technology at the heart of hauntological thought.

Thomas secretly records his wife soothing their child to sleep.

Her anger is not at being recorded—but at being represented in fragments.

She is fixed as a gentle, silent woman—but never truly heard.

Through memory and storytelling, she tries to reclaim the self that was sliced up and

silenced by the machine.

She is not against sound itself—but resists unauthorised fragmentary representation.Her struggle is a defense of subjectivity—trying to return from ghosthood to flesh and

blood.

Running parallel is the modern Erica-Edison storyline.

Encouraged by Edison, Erica uploads her singing to YouTube—seen, liked, commented

on.

But their relationship begins to rupture under the strain of fragmented communication.

Edison once told her: “Erica, the girl who eats only red Skittles.”

But it is this fragmentary self that makes her seen and trapped.

There’s a lingering question between them: “Why won’t you give me your whole self?”

A question not just of love—but of subjectivity in the digital age.

Together, the dual narratives reveal a central tension:

Must we be whole to be heard?

Or can we build meaningful connections between fragments?

Here, I am especially touched by the culturally resonant use of “leaving space” in the

play. It does not treat fragmentation as a problem, nor as something to be resolved.

Instead, it embraces ambiguity—like the “emptiness” （留白）in East Asian painting, where what is not depicted carries energy.

The play, through what it leaves unsaid, invites viewers to reimagine and co-construct

meaning.

This silence is not voicelessness. It is a structure of empowerment.

It does not demand full comprehension, but invites participation— resonance, reflection, and co-authorship.

This approach reflects exactly what I focus on:The interference and permeability between individuals, and the communicative possibilities of the in-between.

Theatre is an open box.Not just performance, not just storytelling.

But collisions of perception, misperception, and unperceived presence.

It is a space and a wave, a summoning and a suspension.

This play, precisely through fragment and blankness, reveals a ghostly theatrical

grammar:

How it extends from the stage into each audience member’s body.

The characters interrogate one another through the unfolding narrative, using fragments to claim authority, to assert their vulnerability and memory.

This is the power of the small theatre, with minimal set and no burden of heavy symbolism.

The two actors nuanced, layered performances draw the audience into a box of co-created subject-object flows.

Here, our gaze and listening also become matter.

We are not passive receivers—we complete the gaps through our own cultural experiences, emotions, and senses.

We participate in an unfinished dialogue,

Feel the push-pull of fragmented speech,

Experience the full journey of how stage matter becomes subject, and then is gazed at

as object again.

Relative Sonics, to me, is not just about sound as technical phenomenon or acoustic landscape.

It is about the dynamic relationship constantly forming between space, body, and

emotion.

It is how characters waver between being heard and being misunderstood.It is how subjectivity is repeatedly lost and reclaimed in recording, editing, and re-representation.

It is Erica’s song.

It is the unpermitted whisper of Thomas Edison’s wife.

It is the faint shift in breath heard from the last row of the theatre.

In this theatrical space made of fragments, gaps, and unfinished words,

Sound is no longer a fixed medium of expression,

but a wave drifting between subject and object, between saying and sensing, between

time and history.

The audience is haunted by these sounds, but also finds a place to project the self

within these gaps.

In these relative, not absolute sonics, the play gives us the freedom to respond:

A space with no single answer, but infinite echoes.

In this sense, theatre becomes a space to be listened to, to be sensed, and to leave

space.

A place where the tensions between ghosts, fragments, and subjectivity are

woven into a gentle symphony.

When the two characters switch places between the red cubes,

when their voices shift from soothing to confrontation,

our attention is guided—softly—by sound design and visual rhythm.

We are immersed between them, above them, after them, feeling that ever-emerging subjectivity.

So, this is not just a play about fragmented representation.

It is a subtle enactment—placing us at the intersection of technology, emotion, and

gaze, inviting us to experience how connection still happens—within fragments, through the gap

我们究竟是在讨论媒介？还是在讨论主体性本身？这是一段被“haunted”的声音给流动的个体的回应。

作为一个文化研究者，戏剧艺术并不是我最熟悉的文化形式。我着迷于探究多重主体之间的干扰（interfering），尤其是在一种游移状态（in-between）中的动态关系（这里的主体包括演员、观众、视觉、听觉等）

那么戏剧与我而言、本身的魅力是它如何将台上的 matter（物）看作个体，再是其发言的主观视角，回到被观看为客体的本质事实（相互反应），而这些角色、身份、感知、全都同时存在于那个被打开的剧场空间中。

这个舞台的空间并不是封闭的，它一直延伸至观众的身体、目光与感受之间。所有的 energy waves，包括角色的呼吸、气息、场域里的空气波动、语言的迟疑与碰撞都成为了这部剧的一部分。

那么我觉得小小的空间是很亲密的，在我眼里不够 budget 的制作也没有任何的违和感，因为我能听得够清楚演员沟通的气息，确保空间里的每一个人都能看见他们的泪光，嘴角的抖动，或者是角色呼吸之间的交涉。

我们能以最直接的方式窥探他们的犹豫和故事，Erica 第一次念出 Edison”的名字那一刻，整个故事拉开了帷幕。

关于故事：

演员既是主角，也是讲故事的人。观众像是在阅读一部自我民族志（autoethnography）也可以说是日记。

角色的主体性与客体性被同时暴露出来，而那些说不满的半句话、相互呼喊的名字、不完整的情绪告白，正是片段性表达欲的真实呈现。这种表达是半外露半内敛的留白，为观众提供了自由反射、自由补全的空间。这种留白本身，就是一种赋权的结构，是拒绝单一主观性叙述的文化姿态。（会在后面详细展开描述这一点）

在这部双线叙事中，我尤其被两位角色之间的主导性的不断流动所打动。他们坐在两个红色立方体上，靠近、后撤、折叠身体、释放张力，语言在安抚与攻击之间转换。

现代的 Edison 是一种躁动的生命力，他的话语看似输出频繁，实则多为反应性的回应（reaction）。他熟悉社交语言与网络语境，对“主体性”这个词有着直觉式的偏爱（他爱独特的人），可是社会面具下的自己的炙热的心可能会无法被真正触及，或者自己都不清楚自己的身体倾向于做什么能安心。

而 Erica，是脱俗的。她小心翼翼地定义着自己的语言节奏，内敛、敏锐、坚定、固执的可爱。她不是不愿表达，而是不愿轻易被代表。她不相信媒介完整的 representation（再现），也质疑平台与片段之间的关系。甚至觉得人们喜爱她与质疑她中间只有一层thin line，那么她的亲密关系的建立也在与这个 thin line 打交道。她相信一种更原始的直觉连接，强烈却又脆弱，这种依赖本身也是她主体性的一部分。

这时，当我们回看与他们并置的历史叙事“真正的发明家托马斯爱迪生与妻子的声音录音事件，我们仿佛听见了一个最初的、被幽灵化（或者说是“被闹鬼的/haunted”）的女性声音的回响：那个最早被记录的女人，不愿被留声机定格成一个片段的母亲/妻子/物化形象，她想要被真实地听见（演员在舞台上也应该被真正听见）。

剧中这种时空叠加构建了一个奇妙的结构：

从现代 YouTube 片段倒流回十九世纪的留声机，从当代媒介再现回到最早的技术记录，声音成为主体性争夺的轨道。观众在声音设计中好像能找到一些蛛丝马迹，内敛的，他们将隐喻和概念呈现于此。

一般亲密故事总是试图触及更大的课题，这部剧正如此，它让我们意识到，现代媒介下的我们已被大量的 fragmented content 包围。每一个声音都可能被片断性发布于网络，成为一个互联网上不完整的某个个体的幽灵，每一个录制的瞬间都可能在时间的回声中，成为不再属于发声者的 representation。这是一场关于被听见的美学困境，也是一场关于如何在片段中寻找真实主体位置的文化练习。

关于“闹鬼”的声音媒介：

我想提到一个概念：“幽灵学/也可以说是闹鬼学”（Hauntology）一词最早由法国哲学家 Jacques Derrida 于 1993 年提出，在其著作《马克思的幽灵》（Spectres of Marx）中被首次使用。这个词由“haunting”（闹鬼、萦绕、幽灵般的存在）与“ontology”（本体论）结合而来，用来描述一种既不属于过去、也不属于现在或未来的存在状态——幽灵即是既已消失却仍然存在，持续干扰现实（给人一种过去闹鬼）的一种时间性与存在方式。

在文化与媒介研究中，尤其是在声音、影像、技术记录的发展语境下，Hauntology 被用来探讨一个关键问题：当人类通过技术手段被记录、再现（represent）、分发时，其主体性是否已经不再完整，而成为一种漂浮在历史与技术之间的“幽灵”？再现的那个东西是否被过去的主体和未来的可能性给 haunted 了？

正是在这个意义上，剧作中的第二条叙事线显得格外重要。它通过虚构的历史段落（托马斯·爱迪生与其妻子的冲突）具体而有力地展现了 hauntology 所关心的主体性与技术之间的张力。

托马斯在妻子不知情的情况下，录下她哄孩子入睡的声音。妻子的愤怒并不源自“声音被保存”，而是源自她意识到自己被以片段的方式“代表”了，她被固定为一个温柔而沉默的女人，却未被真正“听见”。她在试图通过回忆与讲述，去夺回声音片段中那个已经被技术切割、失语的自己。

她不是反对声音的存在，而是拒绝成为未经允许的片段性再现（representation）。她

的抗争正是在一个“被幽灵化的声音片段”中，为主体性辩护，试图从幽灵的状态中返

回 flesh-and-blood 的姿态。

与此平行的，是现代的 Edison 与 Erica 的关系线。Erica 在 Edison 的鼓励下上传自己的歌声至 YouTube，被观看、被点赞、被评论，但他们的情感关系却因交流的碎片性与错位而逐渐破裂。Edison 曾告诉她：“Erica 、the girl who eats only red Skittles.”

可正是这种以片段呈现自身的方式，使她被“看见”的同时，也逐渐被片段所定义、所困住。他们之间始终存在着一种“你为什么不给我你的全部？”的质问，它不仅是情感的困惑，也是一种数字时代语境下对主体性建构的追问。

这两条叙事线索共同揭示了一个核心张力：我们是否必须完整，才值得被听见？

或者，我们是否能在片段与片段之间，建立起一种不依赖完整性却依然可信的连接？

在这一点上，我尤其被剧中那种带有文化韵味的留白处理所打动。它没有将“碎片化的呈现”作为单一的问题或指责对象，而是保留了模糊性与模棱空间，一种“东方式的留白”。

正如东方画作强调“不画之处”的能量，这部剧也在大量未明说、不补全的空间中，赋予了观众以重新想象和构建意义的自由。这种留白并非失语，而是一种赋权的开放结构。它不要求观众“理解全部”，而是邀请观众在缺席与未完成之间参与、共鸣，成为意义生产的一部分。

这种处理方式，也正体现了我所关注的：“在个体之间发生的干扰与渗透（interfering），以及‘in-between’状态中的交流可能。”剧场是一个张开的盒子，不仅是表演，也不仅是叙述，更是感知、被感知、未被感知的不断碰撞。它是一种空间，也是一种波浪；是一种召唤，也是一种悬置。

而这部剧，恰恰在片段与留白之间，为我们展示了幽灵性的剧场语法——它如何在舞台之上，又延伸入每一个观众体内的回响。角色通过故事的展开相互质问，用片段击打主导地位的占领权，巩固自己的脆弱和回忆。

这也正是这个小小剧院，在没有过度布景、没有沉重符号负载的前提下所释放出的空间力量。两个演员的精湛且富有层次的表演，将观众拉入那个由主体与客体不断交叠生成的剧场 box 中。在这里，我们的观看与倾听也是 matter 的一部分。

我们不是单向的接收者，而是以自身的文化经验、情绪共鸣与观看角度，通过听觉视觉和感知去补全那些留白的意义。

我们参与了那场未被说满的对话，感受到了那种片段性语言中的情绪推拉，体会到了stage matter 成为 subject、又被观看为 object 的完整路径。

Relative Sonics，于我而言，不只是声音的技术现象或听觉风景，它更是在空间、身体与情感之间不断生成的动态关系。它代表着剧作中的角色如何在被听见与被误听之间游移，也意味着主观性如何在被记录、剪辑、重现中反复丧失与争夺。它是 Erica 的歌声，是托马斯爱迪生的妻子未被允许的呢喃，是观众在剧场最末排所感知到的一次呼吸节奏的偏差。

在这个由片段、空隙与未竟之语构成的戏剧场域中，声音不再是固定的表述工具，而成为了在主客体之间、表达与感知之间、时间与历史之间游荡的波动体。

观众被“幽灵化”的声响所缠绕，也在缝隙中找到了自我投射的位置。正是在这种不确定、不完整、相对（relative）而非绝对的 sonic 关系中，剧作给予了我们回应的自由——一个没有统一答案，却拥有无限回响的空间。

我想，也正是在这一层意义上，剧场成为了一个被倾听、被感知、被留下空间的地方——一个将我们与幽灵、与片段、与主观性之间的张力，编织成可以被温柔触摸的交响体。

当两位角色在红色立方体之间交换位置、在安抚与质问之间转化语气，注意力被声音设计和视觉传达和缓的引导着，使得我们沉浸在他们之间、他们之上、他们之后，感受那种不断生成的主体性。

所以这部剧不只是讲述 fragmented representation 的哲学，它以一种含蓄的方式，让我们站在技术、情感与观看交汇之处，去亲身经历片段与缝隙之中仍可发生的相遇。