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Last time it came to Melbourne, in a tiny utilitarian space tucked into a dead-end laneway in the CBD, it ran for one night, shut down early after its opening by one of the many lockdowns the city endured during Covid. Bleak times suit this odd, affecting piece, which gains much of its hushed power from the sense of the huddle, the gathering together – but not too close – of a community.

The Nightline is a deceptively simple audiovisual art installation cum verbatim theatre piece, less than 40 minutes long, that is both immersive and self-directed. Audience members sit at individual tables, each lit by a single desk lamp, facing an old plastic rotary phone and a small switchboard that allows you to plug into and out of messages left by the general public between the hours of midnight and 6am.

Communalism is an underlying theme of the piece, which it ironically emphasises through a technology designed for interaction between individuals. That these messages were recorded by people alone in the middle of the night gives the work an added sense of melancholy, a spookiness emanating from the anonymous voice in the dark. Eavesdropping here feels less an act of subversion or surveillance and more like bearing silent, if inconsequential, witness.

One of the delights of The Nightline is the variety and idiosyncrasy of the participants, who come from all walks of life and are linked solely by the desire to leave a message. One voice will be stately and stentorian, and the next will be a tiny, squeaking thing; one will have a clipped, upper middle class register and the following will be full of local slang and elongated vowels. Some seem reluctant or embarrassed by their confessions; others sound like they’re having a blast. Several return night after night – one man signs off “speak tomorrow, if I think of any interesting stories to tell” – as if in some private ritual or benediction.

Co-creator Roslyn Oades cites her own insomnia as a key inspiration behind the piece, and there is a general feeling of anxiety, loneliness and paranoia at work, even when the messages are optimistic or celebratory. Insomnia itself is a kind of marginalisation, pushing people into the more recondite corners of our society, and The Nightline is haunted by the sense of ratcheting despair or crazed inspiration that can come in the dead of night. While it taps evocatively into the romanticism of the demimonde, it doesn’t lose sight of the sober realities of nightshift work, financial desperation and general hardship at the heart of many of these stories (I came across two about amputation!).

There are so many to choose from, and each switchboard is unique, so the sensation of being in an audience falls away to some extent as you concentrate on the voice in your head, a theatre for one. Oades and fellow co-creator Bob Scott counteract this with communal interludes, where the lights begin to flash or coordinate, and certain sounds – of rain or birdsong – overwhelm the voices of the callers. There’s also a matronly guide (Katia Molino), who silently instructs and occasionally darts about looking impervious. She lends the show a 1960s bureaucratic office vibe – as if purgatory were an episode of Mad Men – and serves as a reminder that we’re participating as a group despite the furtive individualism of the form.

Visually, this iteration of The Nightline (production design by Clare Britton) is less liminal and convincingly detailed, the boring black curtains a poor substitute for the tactile grubbiness of the original. And the guide, who spent it last time in an adjoining room behind glass, as if to protect her should we be wiped out in some biological attack, is less impactful this time around, unable to carry the weight of her symbolism. Fausto Brusamolino’s lighting design is still ingenious and winking, and Scott’s sound composition is wonderfully effective as it washes over and weaves its way into the conversation.

Revisiting The Nightline many years after Covid is a sadly reflective experience. The isolation and sense of powerlessness we felt back then hasn’t gone away in the interim, it’s only morphed into further, more complicated variations of powerlessness and isolation. The need for a nightline – an obsolete, deliberately analogue way of reaching out over darkness in the hope of connecting to strangers in the future – seems as pressing and necessary as ever.