Doyle has a very funny problem: he hears too much. He can hear the most intimate details of the lives of everyone living in his apartment building. He can tell the temperature of a young neighbour’s bath water by the resonance of her pipes; he knows where the old lady’s lost teeth are by the way they rattle in their glass when her appliances turn on; he can hear letters of rejection slip from slackened fingers and settle to the ground like the crashing leaves of autumn.
Doyle blames his hyper-sensitive condition on a physical abnormality, on a birth defect in his ears. But we are not so sure. Paralysing Doyle with a cacophony of detail and minutiae, Earshot offers us the gift of a comic Hamlet—a perfectly dark comedy for the information age.
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