Writer: Yaqi Sun
Director: Clara Seitz
An immersive sound-based fringe theatre show in which the listener falls in love with a streamer is ambitious to say the least. Technical difficulties, such as headphones, sound levels/mixing in an unusual acoustic space, need to be overcome, all while creating narrative and ambience for the audience. Yet, because of these challenges, the premise of Stream is intriguing.
When the audience first arrives, the set-up is promising: each audience member is given a small set of earbuds and a radio player all tuned to a specific frequency. The Golden Goose Theatre is three-quarters in the round, and the black walls act as a natural backdrop for the simple set – a few chairs, some stepping stools and a coat stand.
We quickly meet the two main characters of Stream, the listener (Yeohyeon Jung) and the streamer (Mia Sumida), simultaneously heard through the earphones and seen on stage. This duality, combined with the soundscape, led by the ASMR streamer whose levels compete and often overpower Jung’s monologues, rapidly creates confusion, requiring audience members to constantly juggle the volume of the headphones to follow along.
This difficult start remains hard to overcome, as, over the course of the hour, we soon see both film and rapid bursts of text projected on the backdrop, all while the actors alternate between miming the speech from the headphones and completely abandoning the tool. The various sources of information and the almost comically unemotional acting do little to maintain any kind of pace.
Although some of these downfalls can be attributed to technical difficulties and funding – low-quality headphones, minimal props and set – the piece has very little structure and lacks consistency in the choices made in the storytelling.
Reviewed on 22 July 2026
