Immersive Theatre: Up Close and Personal

Image: J.C. Peardon and Ryan Hodson in The Great Gatsby © Aaron Lyon iota media

Audiences are being brought closer to the action than ever before. Productions ranging from The Great Gatsby, to Peter Pan, to Blindness and Monopoly are set to entertain and immerse Australian theatregoers. David Spicer surveys the new landscape.

It used to be a brothel, then it became a nightclub. Now Wonderland Bar, a three and a half storey building in Sydney’s Kings Cross, has become the venue for an immersive theatrical experience of The Great Gatsby.

“Working as an actor, the best thing for me to enjoy feeling is the energy of being on stage. This is the ultimate experience - to give this to the audience so they can be part of the action – to what degree, they choose,” said Gatsby director Beth Daly.

In Melbourne, as this article was written, work was underway to build a hippodrome to stage Peter Pan in a way where every member of the audience is surrounded by the action. The production has, however, been postponed due to international shipping delays.

“In Peter Pan 360°, it does not matter where you sit, looking across and behind the stage. You are immersed,” said producer Craig Donnell.

For major Adelaide Festival production Blindness, audience members wore face masks and sat under glowing bars of criss-crossing, colour-changing lights, while a rumbling soundscape re-creates an epic thriller.

An interactive live game of Monopoly has opened in London, with producers eyeing opportunities to bring it to Australia.

These productions are part of a new movement which breaks down the traditional boundaries of theatre.

The best examples of immersive theatre include a physical environment that is different from a typical theatre, which normally has a proscenium stage and curtain. They include the stimulation of different senses such as smell, taste and touch, and the use of a venue as an art installation or a museum, giving audience members a unique experience and allowing for social interactions in small groups.

The pioneer of this form of performance is the UK site specific theatre company Punchdrunk, which launched its indoor production Sleep No More in 2011 in New York. Post the Covid shutdown, it has just re-launched for an open run.

Sleep No More is a creepy film noir adaptation of Macbeth in a three-storey warehouse nicknamed the McKittrick Hotel. Members of the audience wear masks and explore different rooms where, the New York Times explained, they find “jaded figures in bedrooms, bathrooms, ballrooms, hospital rooms and nurseries getting dressed and undressed, doing the foxtrot, making every kind of love, killing one another and washing off blood.”

Probably the closest experience to Sleep No More is The Great Gatsby, on stage at the Wonderland Bar in Sydney’s Kings Cross until June.

Audiences of just forty are being led through the labyrinth of rooms inside the heritage building for a performance by ten actors, singers and dancers.

“The three and a half storey 1912 building in Kings Cross, at one stage a brothel, was best known recently as the former World Bar night club,” said director Beth Daly.

Image: The cast of The Great Gatsby © Aaron Lyon iota media

“So, it has got the history of parties. Putting these themes into this building feels so right. It is another element of storytelling.

“We explore every nook and cranny of the building. Certain characters will take you aside, to give you an intimate moment no one else sees. There will be bits of intrigue everywhere.”

Should the audience dress up?

“They can be part of the Gatsby party and bring their dancing shoes, but they won’t be made to be on stage if they don’t want to be.

“They could be a fly on the wall. That is the frisson of excitement. They won’t quite know what they will do or might feel like doing.

“Some rooms will feel they like the Sydney Theatre Company; other times the audience will wonder what private bar they have wandered into.”

Image: Jessica Redmayne and J.C. Peardon in The Great Gatsby © Aaron Lyon iota media

The Great Gatsby was published 100 years ago and is now out of copyright, allowing the company to take some liberties with the story.

“We explore what the 20s mean in the 20s. It is a diffusion of 2020 into 1920s.

“It is a big novel - we don’t have time to cover everything. We take the essence of Gatsby and distil that into a piece to satisfy someone who knows nothing about Gatsby, but it will also satisfy an aficionado.”

Beth Daly studied the novel in school but did not like it because it had an unhappy ending.

“Now I appreciate the humanity of the story about the outsider not being let in - the feeling of hope and loneliness - of wanting to create a beautiful future.”

Producer Craig Donnell’s new company Impressario Productions is also breathing new life into a classic - Peter Pan - and giving audiences an experience,which he says immerses them into the production.

“Technology is catching up to imagination. What we can achieve now is fantastic and engaging to bring stories out, told in a new way,” he enthused.

Peter Pan - The 360° Adventure will open in Melbourne in June, in the centre of town, on the Yarra River. Originally staged in London in 2009, the production’s distinguishing feature is a 360-degree surround video projection.

“We have a custom designed CGI film that is choreographed to the production. So on the flight to Neverland, you are flying over Edwardian London,” he said.

“We take people on the journey. They are surrounded by the nursery. When underwater with the mermaids it doesn’t matter where you are looking, you are immersed in the story.”

The hippodrome is being built from the ground up in Australia. All members of the audience will be a few metres off the ground.

“We have trap doors so the cast can scurry around like rats get to all parts of the theatre. There will also be a massive staircase at the back of the stage.

“We have a huge flying rig to allow cast to soar over the audience – up, down, around. All the flying is choreographed into the CGI film. When they get to the cathedral tower, it looks like they will crash into it, but they just manage to turn right.”

Craig Donnell insists that technology will add to the story telling.

“When the first LED walls were released, some people described it as the death of theatre as we know it. It has been embraced to tell stories more vividly.

“I am looking at technology which families are using at home that are interactive and immersive.  We have surround sound and have the ability to scan QRL codes on TV which dictate endings.”

Does the audience become part of action?  

“No, the audience engagement is as an audience. Whilst it is immersive, it not always interactive.”

That is until the audience are prodded to affirm their belief in fairies.

Immersive theatre can be used effectively to evoke terror.

A highlight of the 2022 Adelaide Festival was a production called Blindness, from the Donmar Warehouse in London, which immersed audiences in binaural sound and lighting.

Image: Blindness. Photographer: Helen Maybanks

The regular seating of a theatre is removed and replaced with scattered wooden chairs. Audience members wear masks and sit under light installations, whilst Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago’s dystopian novel Blindness is narrated.

The story centres on the driver of a car who suddenly can’t go on, loses his sight, then his blindness soon spreads across the city causing panic.

The Guardian wrote that the effect of the production is as if the narrator is whispering into your ear. ‘At certain points, the room is plunged into a thick, heavy blackness. The piece is claustrophobic by nature, but when wearing the required mask on a swelteringly hot day, breathing suddenly feels much harder. At these points, the lack of sight is disorienting, and the sound design properly takes effect as the violence of the piece crawls beneath your skin.’

The director of Blindness, Walter Meierjohann, insists that the message from the production is not all bleak.

Image: Blindness. Photographer: Helen Maybanks

“You can walk out of this and say: our epidemic isn’t as bad. The word catharsis means that you have to grow through the dark period in order to show the extremes of what human beings can do to each other in a negative way,” he said.

At the other end of the entertainment spectrum is a new immersive experience called Monopoly Lifesized, which has opened in the West End and looks set to tour the world.

It could best be described as a marriage of theatre and gaming. The set is four life-sized 15 metre by 15 metre games of Monopoly themed into the categories of luxury, classic, city and junior.

Four teams of six players are assigned their selected ‘token’ (including Scottie the dog, battleship, car, boot etc), who is an actor guiding them around the board, which has the traditional Monopoly obstacles.

The property squares have a full-sized, location-specific room behind them that players enter to participate in a challenge to ‘acquire’ it.  These challenges range from staging a heist in Mayfair, to building a London property, or solving a baffling murder mystery.

“Games can become very competitive, and going to jail is indeed one of the many challenges. Each game play lasts approximately 75 minutes,” the publicist Dee McCourt told me.

Stage Whispers has been told that Australia is actively being considered as a future destination for Monopoly Lifesized.

David Hutchinson, CEO of The Path Entertainment Group, said, “The response has been phenomenal and what’s brilliant is seeing people’s passion for Monopoly translate to excitement around this fantastic new immersive experience. We’re already inundated with approaches to set up Monopoly Lifesized in locations around the globe.”

The Great Gatsby plays until June 26 at the Wonderland Bar (formerly The World Bar), 24 Bayswater Road, Potts Point.

Peter Pan - The 360° Adventure was to have opened at the Impresario Hippodrome at Birrarung Marr in June, but has been postponed. New dates to be announced.

Blindness played at the Adelaide Festival in March, then plays in Wollongong from May 11 to 15.

Monopoly Lifesized is ‘playing’ at 213-215 Tottenham Court Rd, London.