“You have a new message”
9 Jun 2025
We caught up with the cast of DELAY between scenes and recording studio sessions to talk sci-fi, bold themes, and the deeper questions the script stirred up. From rehearsal-room character discoveries to imagining how the audience might feel walking away: here’s what they had to say…
Jyuddah Jaymes (JJ) is LIN
Alex Lawther (AL) is the Voice of SILAS
Vera Chok (VC) is the Voice of AUTO
Why were you attracted to this production? What made you want to be part of DELAY?
AL: Tim's writing is gut wrenching. I still haven't managed to get through it without crying. The metaphor he uses -- one person spinning out in space, moving further away in distance and time from their lover back home -- allows him to reveal something extraordinarily tender about what it is to love across many years, what it is to grow old with someone and what it is for life to get in the way of all that, as life has such a way of doing.
How does voice acting for theatre compare to your work in TV and film? What do you like about the different forms?
AL: There is an intimacy with voice work that is really interesting -- you can speak into a microphone as though you are speaking into the listener's ear. And because it is without a visible body, you receive the text in a different way, I think. It allows the listener's mind to fill in a great many parts, and begs for an audience's committing of their imagination, in a way that when you have visuals, part of the imaginative work is done for them.
VC: While I have done a lot of voice acting e.g radio drama and audiobooks, I haven't actually experienced “voice acting for theatre”. Working like this for a show like DELAY is a first for me. But it is similar in that when voicing audiobooks, you’re speaking directly into someone's ear—I love that intimacy, that sort of direct effect, essentially almost into someone's brain. And it's powerful.
A theatrical space might be less intimate, but I have absolute confidence in the artistry of Tim and Tanuja i.e. that what Tim puts together in terms of building the soundscape and Tanuja weaving in the liveness of Jyuddah. I believe that the show will be incredibly affecting - simultaneously dramatic and intimate.
Were there any sci-fi elements in the script that pushed you to think differently about your role?
JJ: Definitely working in zero gravity. That’s a whole thing! Also Lin has so many responsibilities on the ship which makes his job highly complicated and quite rigorous. He has to know that ship inside out, from how it operates on a day-to-day basis to what to do in the event of an emergency. It’s never ending, and again made me have real respect for someone so smart and so capable.
VC: I did think very much about how a computer would ‘think’. AI now is drawing on existing material that's on the internet. And I think AI in the future… will have harvested—that's a horrible, scary word—but would be fed by more than what’s online. It would read body language, for example. And so, in terms of my performance, I wondered whether one could sense a computer think in the way you can feel a person processing — and whether the audience would hear that if I managed to performed that.
I also wanted to know what it felt like, or looked like, or what it sounded like if a computer was struggling to communicate. Because a human being—you would be able to hear hesitation - and the ums, and the ahs, the breath. How would that be for AI, the ship? How would it “feel”, 40 years in the future, about making mistakes or not being able to articulate themselves when things started to go wrong? How does Auto calculate or make decisions based on the behaviour of a human subject who was under high pressure? Can AI have compassion or demonstrate compassion that a human desperately needs?
What message or feeling do you hope the audience walks away with after watching DELAY?
AL: It's a love story, an epic one and an excruciatingly intimate one. If we do Tim's exquisite text justice, I hope people are moved.
JJ: I keep coming back to what we do with what we have, and what we cherish. Do we take every opportunity to hold with gratitude the things that the universe has given us? I want people to go back to their own lives with the question of how they would feel if the one thing that mattered to them the most in the world left them within an instant. Would there be any regrets or would they have filled the time they had with as much of that joy and love as they possibly could.
VC: I think Tim said this: DELAY is not just about expressing love, it's about saying goodbye. I would like audience members to think about how they would say goodbye to people that they cared about. I certainly did—and am still—thinking about people I really hold dear, people who are precious to me, and what I need them to know.
DELAY, I hope, lights a fire in each of us: 'Hey, you can think about goodbyes now.' You can think about this ahead of three minutes before the end of the world, or the end of a person's life. DELAY is giving us this gift of time.
