“Urgent, significant, and yet also deeply beautiful, Radio Live offers the most profound and human piece of art I’ve experienced this year.”
Unlike anything I’ve seen before, Radio Live—though not a conventional “theatre” show—is the most profound and human piece of art I’ve experienced this year.
Having toured the world for at least seven years since its premiere, Radio Live offers a unique blend of live radio streaming and theatre performance, combining live music, documentary, spoken word, and theatrical elements. What sets it apart from other theatre pieces is how it so fearlessly, yet honestly, unveils the brutality of reality and the human stories.
The two-hour runtime felt too short. Through a simple yet careful staging and a series of questions hosted by French Radio Journalist Aurélie Charon (also the show’s creator), Radio Live pulls the distant reality of life in warzones into focus, layer by layer, through the testimonies of Amir Hassan from Gaza and Oksana Leuta from Ukraine. Yet, all the stage setups were secondary—the true, raw power was in the human stories themselves. Unlike other theatre pieces where stories are fictionalized, Radio Live hands the narrative directly to those who lived it. The creator and her team not only strive to offer the tellers’ authority over their own stories but have also kept track of their lives and families throughout the years since the show’s inception. There is minimum artifice in the storytelling. The world of war and the lives within it are revealed entirely from the tellers’ perspectives and through their voices. While theatre often attempts to achieve authenticity on stage, what Radio Live offers is unquestionably, and even horrifyingly, real and breathing.
The sharing from Amir and Oksana was simple, yet beyond anything I could have imagined. It felt like a generous gift from them to unveil their lives to us, to show how war shattered and reshaped their worlds, and to expose the chasm between our peaceful existence and a reality that is, geographically, merely hours away. In two hours, they offered their stories, and we got to peek through a window into their pasts. I saw a profundity in them that I could not fully comprehend—a humanity forged in circumstances far beyond my lived experience, yet one that shone through with warmth and love in their telling.
What in a show can be considered alive? Radio Live offers this answer: people’s lives are alive, their stories are alive, their past is alive, what’s happening out there is alive, we are alive, and what existed in the space during those two hours was alive. In that same room, they existed with us, their past and our present converged into genuine and meaningful connection.
Urgent, significant, and yet also deeply beautiful, Radio Live is a piece that should be seen by every human being.