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There’s plenty that links the two – not least their umbilical link with communities. Is it time to think more creatively about what libraries can do? The words on the page fade to white. A voice in my ear instructs me to keep reading. There’s something impish about this voice, a private soundtrack in this place of supposed silence and study. I am sitting in Bishopsgate Institute Library, listening to The Quiet Volume , a piece of audio-theatre designed by Tim Etchells and Ant Hampton for libraries. Participants are first paired up; then they don headphones and sit side by side with a small stack of books at each person’s elbow. The voice invites them to look around at their fellow readers and to become more conscious of their own “reading voice”; in this way both the act of reading and the space in which they sit becomes defamiliarised, alien, exciting. The piece asks its participants to consider why they read and how they read; it also tries to make them aware of what it is to no longer have that ability. The voice is at times soothing and reassuring, but also at times unsettling as it shifts out of sync with the printed words. The resulting experience is at once meditative and playful, making it impossible not to view both libraries and the process of reading with a greater degree of wakefulness. Libraries – their necessity, their undiminished importance – unite many of the events at this year’s London Word festival , an annual celebration of words, books and language, which runs at various venues in east London until 5 May. The Quiet Volume is being hosted by several very different London libraries, including Hackney Central Library and Senate House Library, while a panel discussion, No Future, So Charming, on 21 April at Bethnal Green Library will look at the evolution of book borrowing. The social role of libraries, their function and power, is an issue that remains as relevant as ever, even though the number of libraries under threat has been reduced somewhat. Currently just under 500 libraries across the UK (including mobile libraries) face closure . The loss might not be cataclysmic, but it will be socially erosive. As Philip Pullman said in response to proposals to close 20 of Oxfordshire County Council’s 43 libraries , “it’s a kind of inward loss, a darkening of things, a narrowing of horizons that will gradually make us a less informed, less intelligent, less aware, less useful, less imaginative, less kindly people than we might have been”. A piece like The Quiet Volume enables its participants to look at these spaces afresh. Even a project like Laughter in Odd Places , a series of comedy gigs in unexpected venues, run by Terry Saunders and Tom Searle – now sadly dormant – did this to an extent. It began life in a library in Camberwell. Surely the relationship between libraries and theatres is one that could be mined further. The Quiet Volume’s co-creator Ant Hampton describes how a book could “be seen as the ultimate portable theatre or event space; a compressed, codified version of the ‘black box’ theatre or the ‘white cube’ gallery, flattened into white squares and black lines”. There is an affinity between libraries and theatres, both are places of gathering and connection. (There’s a nice circularity to the fact that the Bush theatre’s new west London home will be in a former library building). Perhaps the idea of library theatres, or theatre libraries, is one that should be pursued further. We already have plenty of pub theatres. Maybe library theatres could be next? Theatre Libraries Arts funding Natasha Tripney guardian.co.uk