History
Telephone performance began in 1881
Thirty-one entries. The telephone carried performance to a paying audience in 1881 — older than radio, older than cinema, and decades older than anyone thought to call it theater. The form did not begin in 2020, or in 2018.
Twelve works in this archive predate March 2020, and seven of them are Candle House. By the time lockdown made the telephone the only available stage, one company had already run a five-encounter season on it, with an Operator who remembered your previous calls. The pandemic did not invent this form. It gave it an audience.
| Year | Event | What it was |
|---|---|---|
| 1881 | Théâtrophone | Clément Ader, with the Hungarian telephone pioneer Tivadar Puskás, demonstrates it at the International Electricity Exhibition in Paris. Carbon microphones sit behind the footlights at the Théâtre Français and beside the prompter’s box at the Opéra; cable runs through the sewers to rooms at the Palais de l’Industrie lined with tapestries to keep out other sound. Two earphones, one wired to stage left and one to stage right — stereo forty-six years before the word existed. Eight to eleven at night, three evenings a week, a few minutes at a time, and it was potluck what you got: an aria, a speech, the prompter, the applause, or the call to rent opera glasses just as the act ended. |
| 1890 | The Théâtrophone Company of Paris | Pay per listen, predating pay per view. A hundred and eighty francs a year plus fifteen francs a use, with a headset and a transmitter for reaching an operator and choosing between the Opéra, the Opéra Comique, the Comédie Française and the Concerts Colonne. Over 1,500 subscribers by 1893. Coin-slot machines appear in clubs, cafés and hotel lobbies: one franc for five minutes. |
| 1893 | Per Telephone | Margaret Montgomery's stage farce, the earliest telephone play traced in this archive. Documented in Richard Menke, Genres of the Telephone. |
| 1894 | The Electrophone | H. S. J. Booth launches the London service — five pounds to install, ten pounds a year, connecting a dozen theatres, the Royal Opera House, music halls and churches. Around six hundred subscribers by 1900, peaking just over two thousand in 1923. A salon on Gerrard Street let several people share one connection at a table of headsets. |
| 1898 | The pleasure telephone, documented | A London subscription service pipes theaters and churches into subscribers' rooms for about 100 dollars a year. Transmitters sit on the footlights of sixteen named theaters and in the pulpits of sixteen named churches — at Holy Trinity, concealed in a box shaped to look like a Bible. Listeners hold rubber ear tubes of the kind used in street phonographs, and reach the performance by calling Central exactly as for any other number. The manager reports rising demand for bedside installations. Reported in the San Francisco Call, 28 August 1898, as Bellamy's Looking Backward come true. |
| 1899 | Queen Victoria listens | At Windsor Castle, to schoolboys singing God Save the Queen at Her Majesty’s Theater, and afterwards to the concert at St James’s Hall. The Prince of Wales had reached it first, having his sickroom wired to the Albert Hall while laid up with an injured knee. |
| 1901 | Au Téléphone | André de Lorde and Charles Foley, Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, Paris. A husband hears his family murdered down the line and cannot intervene. The founding telephone melodrama, and the first work to put the audience on the wrong end of a call. |
| 1902 | Heard at the Telephone | The English staging of Au Téléphone at Wyndham's Theater, London, with Charles Warner. It seeded D. W. Griffith's The Lonely Villa (1909) and made murder over the telephone an international paradigm for suspense. |
| 1911 | Proust subscribes | He kept the théâtrophone beside his bed, rarely well enough to attend. When the sound would not resolve into words he supplied them himself, if the opera was Wagner. He fell in love with Pelléas et Mélisande over the line, and once mistook the noise of the interval crowd for an aria. |
| 1925 | The Electrophone closes | The Postmaster-General withdraws the licence and the service ends on 30 June, two years after the first wireless broadcast of opera from Covent Garden. The théâtrophone follows in 1932. Radio had arrived. |
| 1930 | La voix humaine | Cocteau, premiered at the Comédie-Française with Berthe Bovy. One woman, one telephone, one half of a conversation the audience must infer. Beckett attended and called it “not merely a banality but an unnecessary banality,” then spent forty years answering it. |
| 1960s–70s | Activities | Allan Kaprow |
| 1965 | Eh Joe | Beckett's teleplay inverts Cocteau's polarity: the male auditor is held in close-up while the woman's voice is exiled off-screen. Siân Phillips was close-miked with high and low frequencies filtered out. |
| 1966 | Simultaneity in Simultaneity | Marta Minujín |
| 1968 | Dial-A-Poem | John Giorno |
| 1990s | Audience of One | Jamie Leo |
| 1992 | Intimacies | Janet Cardiff |
| 1998 | Conversations | Janet Cardiff |
| 2005 | Call Cutta: Mobile Phone Theater | Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) |
| 2008 | Call Cutta in a Box: An Intercontinental Phone Play | Rimini Protokoll |
| 2010 | A Machine To See With | Blast Theory |
| 2013 | Here and There Along the Echo | Cardboard Computer |
| 2015 | Sights | TricksterP |
| 2018 | @lastcandlearx | Candle House |
| 2018 | Crossed Wires | Candle House |
| 2019 | Ototheatre | Lauren R. Beck |
| 2019 | Under the Bed | Candle House runs a select-your-own menu of five one-act telephone encounters for a solo participant — BLACK BOX, GOOD MORNING, Rebozo, NEXT TIME and THE LUCKY ONES — three months before lockdown. Book four or more and the Operator calls: a host who framed the stories and remembered what you had already been through. Cross-call memory, before the field had a name for it. |
| 2020 | Showing Without Going | Ant Hampton and Caroline Barneaud, Théâtre de Vidy-Lausanne |
| 2020 | The boom | — |
| 2020 | The Canadian wave | Within weeks of lockdown, Outside the March launches The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries; Convergence Theater stages The Corona Variations; Dopolavoro Teatrale opens Theater on-Call; Boca del Lupo restages Red Phone and tours it, the first Canadian theater production to tour since the pandemic began. Documented in Robert Motum, Calling from Canada. |
| 2020 | Serveur Vocal Humain | In France, Julien Daillère performs a synthetic voice himself, live, navigating a branching script by hand — a human impersonating the automated system callers expect. He founds the group “Artistes au téléphone” the same month. |
For the first fifty years, the listener could not be heard. The théâtrophone and the Electrophone were one-way: you chose a program through an operator and you could switch off the dull parts, but you could not speak, and the performers did not know you were there. A subscriber writing to The Times in 1957 named that as the pleasure — the actors were “probably being unaware that we at home were eavesdropping.” Annegret Fauser puts the cost of it precisely: the feedback loop of live performance was cut by the medium, even though performers performed and listeners listened at the same moment.
This matters for the anatomy. Two of the criteria this archive tests — whether the spectator must participate, and whether anyone is performing live — describe features the form did not originally have. Documented in Adrian Curtin, “Recalling the Theatre Phone” (2013).
Further work: the Call Cutta team — Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel — have not been interviewed, and Adrian Curtin’s “Recalling the Theatre Phone” is the deepest historical root still unread.