Bijan Sheibani

To make the music microplay, Robin French and I met with John Harris, who was at the NME in the early 90s, became the editor of Select magazine and currently writes about music and politics for the Guardian. We discussed the ways in which music technology has changed within our lifetimes; music is now contained on our computers and phones, and in that way it is less tangible than it used to be. Our story started to become about the objects that music can be recorded on to, and what those objects contain. We became interested in the ways in which compilation tapes can contain and then communicate not just music, but memories – a set of feelings, a character, a relationship. A tape could be found again long after it was made and re-experienced by the listener.

This idea that moments of life can be recorded and re-experienced is one of the main preoccupations of a director. In film these moments are recorded and locked, but in theatre they are always in flux, and fleeting. Rehearsing is about pursuing moments when something true, moving, interesting or real is made manifest. In theatre you either set up the circumstances by which that thing can emerge, or you have to retrospectively analyse what it was that allowed that thing to emerge, and find the means by which it can be kept and repeated by the actors.

That doesn’t mean kept as it was the first time you saw it, but kept alive, with the possibility that it might develop into something even richer. You are trying to grow something that will eventually have a life of its own, and which will be nourished and developed, all being well, by its audience; by the responses that the actors can hear. It will always be changing. Like a chef, the director goes back now and again to adjust for taste.

A film, like a compilation tape, obviously doesn’t grow in the same way as a set of live performances. After the day of the shoot the potential content is fixed. And at the very beginning of the editing process you are confronted by everything you don’t have and will never have, everything you forgot to capture on the day of the shoot, or didn’t think was important to capture given the shoot’s nine-hour time limit. As that happens, the longing begins. If only I’d asked her to do it like that; if only he wasn’t moving on that line, then that shot could have gone after that one. It’s too late; the actors are on to their next jobs, or in the case of one of ours, back at school.

But as you start to assemble the film in the edit, the possibilities of what you can do with this limited amount of material begin to feel limitless, the number of configurations infinite. Then something logical begins to emerge. One piece of the jigsaw demands another, one decision leads to another, and eventually it starts to look like it might become a whole. A picture emerges, not the one you imagined, it never is, but if the thing is alive, it will grow as it needs to, and become the thing it needs to become. There comes a point where the edit, like the theatrical run, has to end. The end of the edit is called lock down, the end of a run is called the final night; a living process is condemned to the past.

But in our story the character of the listener is not in the past; he has grown older, presses play and listens again. Something has been recorded, something has been lost, but perhaps something new is being experienced by him too. In that respect a film, like a tape, like a play, is not a fixed entity, but may have differing interactions as the world around it changes, may develop other meanings the older it gets.

More about Off the Page

Off the Page is a series of six filmed microplays made by the Guardian and the Royal Court theatre. The project brings together journalists, playwrights and directors to create responses to issues in six key areas of our coverage: food, music, fashion, sport, education and politics. The next microplay, on the subject of sport, will be online on 24 November.

John Harris

The onward march of technology tends to make what was once arduous and complicated amazingly easy – something proved by everything from the aeroplane to the electric kettle. From time to time, though, effort and difficulty are not the only thing that supposed advances threaten to sweep away: with them, if you’re not careful, might go essential aspects of being human. This may be why an object as archaic as the electric guitar is still here; or why even the most carefully programmed drum machine is no substitute for some overheated Herbert laying waste to wooden cylinders capped with skins.

And so it is with the electronic reproduction of music. I am old enough to still find the MP3 miraculous. Equally, the business of streaming music and thereby tapping into an infinite jukebox occasionally seems to be the result of a strange kind of magic. But both ways of listening to music also offend against some of the fundamentals of how it should be done. Spotify can put the listener in a constant state of distraction; shuffling songs on an iPod destroys any notion of context, let alone original artistic intent. And what of the idea that music ought to be carried on a physical object; preferably one synonymous with a set of memories – a particular place, a relationship?

This is what Bijan Sheibani and Robin French’s microplay evokes, to wonderfully moving effect. It is unashamedly nostalgic, but it looks back at the world of 20 years ago with real wonderment. A lot of people will be familiar with the ritual it portrays: marking the first phase of a relationship by making a compilation tape to somehow describe yourself to the other person; cutting out your own cassette inlay; ensuring everything is just-so. It also gently celebrates the early 1990s heyday of the British music press, and specifically the NME: a product that was so of a piece with the tactile elements of being a music fan that the ink came off on your fingers.

Along the way, light is also subtly shone on recent developments that prove that supposedly old-fashioned ways of listening may never go away. In the UK, sales of vinyl records have been increasing since 2007, and are this year forecast to reach 1m – something that has not happened since 1996. Even the cassette, which received opinion has long condemned as a shoddy, unreliable format – something to which the play makes knowing reference – refuses to disappear. Inevitably, the latter is chiefly associated with a certain kind of neo-primitive hipster: Cassette Store Day, inaugurated in 2013, was born – but of course! – in the beardy London cultural paradise that is Dalston. But fair play: there is evidence of a modest uptick in sales both here and in North America, and a re-evaluation of its worth.

Last week, for example, the British musician Stephen Duffy offered his own tribute to reels of magnetic tape encased in plastic rectangles. I follow him on Twitter; back when this play is set, he and his group The Lilac Time released a brilliant album called Astronauts, at least one track from which would usually make it on to my own compilation tapes. On 14 November, he tweeted a picture of what was once called a personal stereo, and paid tribute to the third solo album by Paul Westerberg of those cultish American pioneers the Replacements. “The last Walkman,” he wrote, “changed the battery pressed play - Suicaine Gratification - sounding amazing - damn you iPod.”

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