This week, I’ve been looking for distractions. I wanted something short, fast and engaging alongside my other reading. So I pulled two Audible Originals full-cast dramas from my TBR pile.

Both dramas were commissioned by the Audible Emerging Playwrights Fund which Audible says is “an initiative dedicated to developing innovative original plays driven by language and voice.” Audible commissioned playwrights, receive received funding and creative support to develop the commissioned play.

Both plays run for about 100 minutes and both were included in my Audible membership.

They were both good fun. I enjoyed ‘Evil Eye‘ best, partly because of the innovative storytelling style and partly because I had no idea where it was going most of the time.

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‘Evil Eye‘ is told entirely through phone calls and voicemail messages. Even though using this technique to capture all the action required a little ingenuity at one point, I found style immersive and engaging.

I loved the progression in the story. At the start, in the conversations between the living and working in America daughter and her returned home to New Delhi mother, it seems as if the story is about a mother anxious to get her now almost twenty-nine-years old daughter married. Of the two, the daughter is the one easiest to relate to. I smiled as I watched her appease her anxious and seeemingly out of touch mother.

Then the story took a darker turn and my perceptions began to shift. As the tension rose, it increasingly seemed as if it was the mother who really understood what was going on. Except that what the mother thought was going on was impossible. Wasn’t it?

This was a tense story that kept me guessing and which conveyed a real sense of threat.

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‘Nightfall‘ was an intense three-hander play, this time featuring a teenage girl, her stepmother and a stranger who turns up with bad news and unknowable intentions.

The story was a twist on the ‘What would you do to survive the apocalypse?’ trope, made more intense by narrowing the focus to the three people alone in the wilderness, trying to work out what to do while coping with shock, grief, distrust and external threat. I liked the early sections of the play which established the uneasy relationship between the disaffected teen and her stepmother. I disliked the stranger as soon as he arrived, which is remarkable given that everything he said made sense but the script made me anxious and kept me that way to the end.