New Binaural Musical AUDIO GUIDE Sets First Industry Presentation at Southwark Playhouse

London-based theatre company ILOVESTAGE UK Ltd is developing a new original musical, AUDIO GUIDE, in which every audience member wears headphones and experiences the story through binaural sound.

A first draft of the book has now been completed, with six original musical numbers currently written. The company is preparing to enter the next phase of development, with a studio session planned for late September involving a music producer and a performer to create the project's first cast recordings. Further details of the recording dates and participating artists are expected to be announced shortly.

What distinguishes AUDIO GUIDE from a conventional musical is its performance architecture.

Only one principal performer appears physically on stage. The other characters are experienced primarily through the audience's headphones, with voices, memories and movement appearing to travel from left to right, from behind the listener and, at times, from immediately beside the ear.

Through binaural sound, characters and spaces that do not physically exist on stage are instead constructed inside the listener's imagination.

The creative team describes the concept simply:

'The eyes watch one actor. The ears create an invisible world.'

The 90-minute musical is being developed around a single live performer, six or more songs and an ensemble of characters created through binaural audio. The headphones are not intended as an additional technical effect, but as part of the dramatic language of the production itself. The project's current development materials describe the central proposition as a musical in which 'one actor is on stage, but an entire world is built inside the audience's head'.

Binaural sound has already established itself as a distinctive theatrical language on the London stage.

Simon McBurney and Complicité's The Encounter demonstrated how a single performer and individually worn headphones could create an expansive auditory world, subsequently playing the Barbican, Broadway and international dates.

The Donmar Warehouse's 2023 production of Macbeth, starring David Tennant and Cush Jumbo and directed by Max Webster, similarly used headphones and a binaural-based three-dimensional soundscape as an integral part of the production. The production subsequently transferred to the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End in 2024.

More recently, Hampstead Theatre's A Ghost in Your Ear placed headphones and binaural sound at the centre of the audience experience.

What remains comparatively unusual is the integration of this theatrical language across the music, dialogue and narrative structure of an original commercial musical.

AUDIO GUIDE aims to take a form that has proved highly effective in drama and develop it within the grammar of musical theatre. Rather than relying on large-scale scenery or visual spectacle, the project is designed to expand the theatrical world through the performer's body, music and the individual listener's imagination.

Producer Junyoung Kim of ILOVESTAGE UK has recently been meeting a number of British theatre-makers with experience in headphone-based and binaural performance to discuss potential collaboration on the project. Some members of the creative team are currently in early pre-production discussions, with further appointments to be announced once agreements are finalised.

The project began with an idea from the Australian short film Audio Guide.

The 2019 science-fiction short was written by Australian writer and journalist Lee Zachariah and directed by Chris Elena. Running for approximately 14 minutes, the film begins with the deceptively simple premise of a museum audio-guide device that stops describing artworks and instead begins revealing private information about the people around it.

ILOVESTAGE UK has reached an agreement with Zachariah allowing the company to use that central concept as the starting point for a new theatrical work. Under the agreement, the musical is being developed with an entirely new narrative, characters, structure and theatrical language, with the resulting stage work constituting an independent new creation.

For the musical, that simple premise has been expanded into a much larger human story.

The protagonist, James Carter, is a 33-year-old legal assistant who once dreamed of becoming a solicitor but now lives an increasingly anonymous professional life. Sent to a digital art gallery on an errand for his employer, James puts on an audio-guide headset and discovers that the device is beginning to reveal information not only about the artworks, but about the lives and possible futures of the people around him.

At first, the information appears to give James the opportunity to help someone in danger.

But as he begins to understand the apparent power of the device, the ability to know other people's secrets and possible futures becomes increasingly seductive. What begins as an opportunity to intervene in another person's life gradually raises a more troubling question: what happens when knowledge becomes judgement, and judgement becomes control?

Although AUDIO GUIDE uses artificial intelligence and predictive technology as its dramatic starting point, the musical is ultimately concerned with something more intimate: fate and free will, the lives we did not choose, the regrets that remain with us, and whether it is ever possible to choose again.

Kim said:

'Even if technology one day becomes capable of telling us our future with complete accuracy, that does not necessarily mean we would want to know it. AUDIO GUIDE is not really a musical about a machine that predicts the future. It is about someone who has spent his life believing there must be a correct answer, and who slowly discovers that living may require choosing without one.'

The current script places James at the centre of a story about alienation, power and self-recovery, with the six existing songs tracing that progression across the musical.

Development of the book, music and initial vocal material has so far been financed by ILOVESTAGE UK. The company is now preparing for a late-September studio recording session, alongside further development of the production's binaural sound prototype.

The musical will receive its first formal industry presentation on 16 October 2026 at Southwark Playhouse Elephant, as part of the BEAM Pitching Day.

Produced by Mercury Musical Developments and Musical Theatre Network, BEAM is one of the UK's principal platforms for the development and presentation of new musical theatre. Previous projects developed through the wider BEAM ecosystem include Operation Mincemeat and Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York).

Following the October presentation, the producers plan further workshops and binaural prototyping, with the aim of presenting a London trial production in autumn 2027. Longer-term plans include further UK performances, international touring and licensed productions in other languages. The project's development roadmap currently places the 2027 London run as the next major commercial testing stage.

For ILOVESTAGE UK, the ambition is not to use binaural sound as a theatrical gimmick, but to make it inseparable from the storytelling.

One actor may stand on stage. The world of AUDIO GUIDE is intended to exist somewhere else entirely - inside the audience's head.

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