The Nightline is an immersive experience that trades primarily on the human voice. Attendees listen, or rather eavesdrop, to anonymous late-night, early-morning messages left by desperate, insomniacal, and shift-working Melburnians.

Created by director Roslyn Oades with sound artist Bob Scott, the show invites intimacy and fosters care for strangers, whose disembodied voices tell stories, secrets, desires and confessions.

Katia Molino in The Nightline. Photo © Simon Fazio

We’re guided by a concierge, Katia Molino, into a darkened space in the Malthouse’s Bagging Room filled with rows of small tables, upon which sit old-fashioned rotary dial phones and lamps.

For about 45 minutes, you sit alone, pick up the handset and fiddle with your personal switchboard to access recordings from the city’s restless and nocturnal. You can tune in and out as you please.

The Nightline has toured elsewhere, including runs at Sydney and Adelaide Festivals, but at each location the organisers have arranged for different volunteer callers, so there is a unique flavour to each city.

The Nightline. Photo © Simon Fazio

In its latest iteration, there’s a young university student worried about failing her exams, a teary widower missing his wife, and a vengeful lover among the mix. Birdsong, rain and lightning are also interwoven into the recordings, which are amplified by the room’s own light and sound design.

As you listen to a stream of voices from different ages and backgrounds, what seems to connect all these micro stories is a sense of naked vulnerability. These are people who, for whatever reason, need to talk and hope to be heard.

Stripping away the usual theatre performances for a series of monologues requires more attentive listening, but concentration is made easier by the lack of distractions from sets or actorly gesticulations.

Who among us has not been fretfully awake in the middle of the night? The Nightline allows for a visceral, sometimes disturbing connection with these other sleepless ruminants and their individual cares and concerns.

The Nightline is performed in the Bagging Room, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne until 29 August.