The emotional impact of the compilation tape has become a subject of increasing cultural significance of late. Especially, it seems, since technology looks like rendering the C-90 obsolete. Once the perfect means of expressing through an all-too-personal selection of songs what words couldn't, the compilation tape looks set to become one more archaic totem left behind in the fall-out of the relationship game.

This potency of cheap music has already been explored in several ways. Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore has edited a not-quite-coffee-table book called Mix Tape, in which he and his musical peers lay bare their direct experiences of compilation tapes via a series of deeply personal testimonies. Similarly, comedian Daniel Kitson's solo play, C-90, fictionalised a depository where all the compilation tapes that were missing, presumed dumped, were archived.

Sonic Youth, alongside Nirvana and Girls Aloud, appear on the soundtrack of Static, Suspect Culture's new collaboration with the London-based Graeae company, in which such magic moments rewind and fast-forward themselves into dramatic life.

According to writer Dan Rebellato, Static's origins may be typical of Suspect Culture's line of intellectual inquiry concerning how people do or don't communicate, but the play's driving force was far closer to home. "Jenny Sealey from Graeae is directing it with Suspect Culture's Graham Eatough," Rebellato points out, "and, when they were developing ideas, she said her partner made her compilation tapes. Because she's deaf we all found that very moving, and what emerged out of that personal experience was something about how people manage to communicate despite the obvious barriers. This story of a widow who believes her dead husband is communicating with her through this compilation tape came directly out of that. We then got very interested in the idea of how listening to music at a very personal level begins to look like prayer. The way in which you listen becomes about trying to pick up clues or wanting so much to feel some kind of sign or presence. It's this desperate desire for some kind of contact."

Rebellato's last statement pretty much sums up the transcendent power of a pop song, and music's often wordless power to encapsulate heartbreak and loss. But he also makes Static sound like a direct descendant of beyond-the-grave celluloid romances Truly, Madly, Deeply and Ghost, and, if you want to put subtitles on it, Krzyztof Krieslowski's Three Colours: Blue.

Suspect Culture's back catalogue has long concerned itself with how people struggle to make connections - physi-cal, mental and emotional. Eatough and the company's collaborators have also attempted to move their work beyond words, introducing recurring physical tics as trademark signifiers of a character's personality. A collaboration with Graeae, then, is especially interesting.

Graeae were probably the first theatre company in the UK to pioneer work performed by professional disabled actors. Since Sealey took over as artistic director, she has introduced a form of work whereby signing plays for the deaf is more than a tokenistic add-on, but is actually integrated into a play's action.

"Sign language," Rebellato says, "is absolutely its own language, with its own syntax and sets of rules. So you have to approach it in exactly the same way as I would with any other language, in that I occasionally tune in as things come in and out of focus.

"So I've written the script entirely in English, and there are certain ways you need to write with other things in mind. But I've quite deliberately made some speeches difficult."

"So, on one level Static is a play about music and the role it plays in ordinary lives, and the power it has as a vehicle to express certain things."

The power of love?

"I guess we could go down that Jennifer Rush route," says Rebellato, possibly considering his own mix tape choice. "If we have to."

  • Static opens today at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, runs until February 23, then tours.