10. Inner Ears and Distant Worlds: Podcast Dramaturgy and the Theatre of the Mind

This chapter draws from phenomenology to argue that podcasts provide the opportunity for audio-dramaturgy to instigate a radical break with the limits placed on it by radio technology. It questions prevalent theoretical characterisations of audio-drama as the theatre of the mind, understood intellectually and deliberatively, rather than immanently, due to the evanescent, amorphous nature of sound. Instead, the chapter draws from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception to posit that listening to audio-drama is fundamentally a bodily experience, and the conception of the theatre of the mind arises from the confines of the medium of radio, rather than the sonic nature of audio-drama. Podcasts, it concludes, allow for a move away from conventional radio practices and toward more sonorous and bodily forms of audio-dramaturgy.