Author: Max Shanagher

By Max Shanagher

Sitting on the DLR to Woolwich, I started to question the life decisions that I had taken six months previously. Six months ago, at the Library bar in Durham, my friend and I decided to start an Immersive Theatre company. My only problem was that I didn’t really know what immersive theatre was. In my head, I must admit, I had a hipster version of the London Dungeon where over-confident actors are followed by over-pretentious audience members.  

So as I sat on the DLR to Woolwich, I was questioning whether it was wise to get involved with a theatre company that specialises in it. These questions were finally given an answer when I reached my destination: Punchdrunk’s ‘The Burnt City’.  

Now, these four words may not make any sense to you (they certainly didn’t to me) so I shall define both ‘Punchdrunk’ andThe Burnt City. Punchdrunk is an immersive theatre company that was founded in 2000 who hire large venues and convert them into elaborate, multi-room spanning plays. In New York, they perform a play called Sleep No More that takes place in the McKittrick Hotel, an abandoned hotel from the 1940s. Sleep No More is a Noir adaptation of Macbeth, and audience members are allowed to explore the hotel and to decide which rooms they want to stay in or which actors they want to follow.  

The Burnt City is this premise of audience autonomy brought to two large arsenal buildings in Woolwich Dockyard. The play takes place over two spaces and is set at the time of the Trojan War, with one building being designated to represent Greece and one to represent Troy. I went with my family and was excited to see their reaction to the completely converted arsenals. 

Entering the arsenals, I was struck by the scale and detail with which the set was constructed. I was able to wander into rooms and read letters sent from soldiers back home. I lost my family quite quickly, as encouraged by the actors at the start, but once entering the wide expansive room representing Greece, I saw a man who seemed to have found the only seat in the whole venue, and I assumed it to be my dad. You are not allowed to talk in Punchdrunk performances, but I approached this strange figure and asked him what he thought of it so far. Thankfully, it was my dad, but I wasn’t thankful for his one-word response: ‘bizarre’. I suppose it was bizarre. All the audience were wearing masks and were dotted around the different rooms searching for meaning in these choreographed spaces. That was the joy I thought though, the feeling of being able to choose my experience and choose what I get out of the play was unlike any other theatre I had been to. 

It seemed fresh and new to me, and reinvigorated my passion for theatre. It may have felt fresh, but it wasn’t particularly new. In the 1980s, Laura Farabough wrote and directed Surface Tension which took place in a swimming pool, first performed at UC Berkeley Campus. In India, there have been performances of Ramlila since the 19th Century, the play having been inscribed into UNESCO world heritage status in 2008. In a performance of Ramlila, according to UNESCO the ‘audience is invited to sing and take part in narration’ and the audience take active roles in the production. This is the blueprint for immersive theatre: audience autonomy and transforming spaces into theatrical realms.  

Why this type of theatre feels to me particularly relevant to modern times is because of the theatrical potential for virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI. Virtual reality has almost the same premise as immersive theatre: transforming the virtual space and allowing the participant to have autonomy in their decisions. Augmented reality similarly is about transforming space and AI may have the potential to change the ability to improvise in theatre. Immersive theatre allows for audiences to have real, lived experiences where they might have otherwise had a virtual experience. Making the effort to see a play in person and seeing the dedication that actors and the crew put into creating a performance is unlike anything that can currently be achieved by these technological advances.  

There is no hiding in immersive theatre but that is the joy of it. Seeing live performances, with their brilliance and their mistakes is what makes theatre, to me, so great. The allure of being able to decide your own journey does not have to be limited to the virtual world, but can also be physical and present. All this I realised on the slightly less bleak return journey from Woolwich. 

Which brings me to Antony and Cleopatra, a play I’ve been directing for the past few months. We have hired Durham’s Student Union Ballroom, and for three performances, are transforming it into Egypt and Rome across two rooms. The audience can decide at the start whether they would prefer to be in Egypt and Rome, and from that point on will have different experiences. Getting actors (some of whom specialise in classical theatre) to imagine the audience in rehearsals and work on their improvisational skills has been a joy.  

Thanks to Hetty, Kate, and Teagan, our student writers, we have been able to create a simultaneous script for Egypt and Rome, inspired by Shakespeare’s script. Shakespeare’s language is key, however, and supports our reasoning that the play would adapt well to immersive theatre because of its focus on space and the occupation of different spaces. One of my favourite lines from the play is Enobarbus’ ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale | Her infinite variety’ in describing Cleopatra. In many ways I see these lines to describe theatre as well, immersive theatre, in my view, currently contributing a small but important part to theatre’s ‘infinite variety’. 

Antony and Cleopatra will be performed on the 10th and 11th of November in Dunelm House. Find out more via @walkaboutproductions on Instagram.

Photo Credit: westendtheatre.com

By Max Shanagher.

One existential crisis in a day usually causes me to sit rocking back and forth in a dark room. Two existential crises in a day causes me to rock back and forth for a week. Now, finally, I have emerged from my fugue state and turned the lights on in my room. What was the cause of this state? Social media’s insistence that I go and see the films Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day.

Reluctantly, I admit that I failed to see them back to back. I wanted to see Oppenheimer in its intended IMAX format and sadly Barbie didn’t have any showings which paired up to the allocated time slot. So I had to plan my day: there were two options to follow.

See Oppenheimer first in the morning, accompanied by a black coffee and a cigarette. Leave Oppenheimer and go and sit in a park for two hours, staring at the birds and the trees. Then get a pre-planned call from a friend, asking if you would like to go to a bar and have a nice cocktail or two. Once enjoying this pre-planned buzz of social reacceptance, going to the bar and getting a little bit drunk. Not so drunk that I would fail to appreciate the golden age of Hollywood-inspired glamour of Barbie, but drunk enough that I am able to put a veil over my eyes that avoids Mattel’s obvious attempts to kick start their own toy cinematic universe. I would exit Barbie cheering and whooping. What fun. 

I decided against this. I woke up, and put on the best Ken costume I could find. Quickly fast forwarding through the trailer, I established that Ryan Gosling’s Ken’s job in the movie is the elusive ‘Beach’. So for inspiration, I picked out a combination sported by many Durham students on the sunny beaches of Seaham and Crimdon. Pink shorts and a cream linen shirt. I walked down the street to see people blinded by my Kenergy. Somebody fainted so I had to call an ambulance. We arrived at the cinema, accompanied by two small tins of some ambiguously named cherry cocktail, and sat back for the movie. What a bizarrely fun movie it was — highlights being Margot Robbie’s inability to ugly cry (more ugly crying will appear later) and a highly coordinated dance off between Ryan Gosling and Simu Liu. I emerged from the movie with a big grin on my face. I then looked at my phone.

The far-right on Twitter had decided that the portrayal of Ken was a demeaning portrayal of their masculinity and Ben Shapiro had created a forty three minute video DESTROYING Barbie. I think what occurred here was more Greta Gerwig DESTROYING them; a grown forty year old man sitting in front of a camera complaining for forty minutes shows that the film touched a nerve. Gerwig not only creates a matriarchal Barbieland lacking wars or hatred (suggesting how the patriarchal ascription of some notions of violence to masculinity has caused some problems) but also shows through the disaffection of Kens the importance of the universal equality of the sexes. It was an advert, a well executed advert with genuine feeling and a strong feminist message but an advert nonetheless. Admittedly, if anyone would like to sponsor me to get an ‘I am Kenough’ jumper for 60 dollars, message me and I’ll give you my PayPal. How the far-right could be so affected by an advert demonstrates the power of the movie in itself, by responding to it with such hatred they have shown the problems with the values which they so admire. 

Much like Superman changing into his super suit in a telephone box, I chose the Vue Cinema toilets to be my location where I switched into my Oppenheimer garb. Gone were the contact lenses, flicked out with reckless abandon and replaced with tortoise shell glasses. I stripped off my pink shorts and replaced them with jeans and accompanied the shirt with a black turtleneck. Apart from embracing chelonian clothing (a word I have discovered, which means turtle and tortoise-like), I was embracing a more intellectual look. Less successful than my Ken outfit, to my dismay, I arrived at the IMAX five hours later to see people wearing lab coats and Oppen-styled hats. I was a fashioned embarrassment, munching popcorn in an over-hot jumper. 

The popcorn munching began five minutes into the movie because the queue to the concession stand created a general crush outside of the IMAX doors. If anything happened of note in the first five minutes please do let me know, I was very sad to miss it (Mum and Dad I have to blame you for your insistence that my girlfriend and I could carry all the snacks, there were too many snacks, far too many snacks). Once the movie began, I was mesmerised. The three hour run-time passed surprisingly quickly, with no points at which I felt it was dragging too long. The sound design, I thought, was the best part. In typical Nolan-style it was difficult in parts to hear dialogue but I couldn’t care less as I felt the blast-wave of an Atomic bomb just by its sound. Cillian Murphy’s performance was brilliant; worries for a brooding Tommy Shelby with an American accent were quickly displaced. I’ve enjoyed afterwards watching Robert Downey Jr’s promotional material for the film. Nolan challenged Downey Jr to perform as the ‘Salieri’ to Oppenheimer’s ‘Mozart’, and I thought through this premise the intrigue was sustained through to the film’s conclusion.

Once again, I picked up my phone upon leaving the cinema to read Twitter. This time, more liberal voices argued that Nolan failed to give voice to the Native Americans and Japanese people who were affected by Oppenheimer’s actions. I agreed with the lack of voice given to Native Americans who were displaced in Los Alamos; they were reduced to a few throw-away lines and Oppenheimer was obviously aware of their presence by suggesting upon the closure of Los Alamos that the ground be restored to them. I disagree with the argument that it lacks a Japanese voice. The reason I disagree is because I thought that the movie captured the genuine American nationalism that was occurring during the war through the lead up and the fallout from the nuclear bombings. It would have been interesting to portray Oppenheimer’s visit to Japan in 1960, particularly because it occurs only a year after Strauss’ nomination by Eisenhower (which the film covers). 

Japanese film has captured the impact of the war on the citizens of Japan so strongly that they could be shown as perhaps a much stronger accompaniment to Oppenheimer than Barbie. I watched Studio Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies when I was 10 and living in Japan. I would suggest not showing the film to a ten year old because I cried for weeks, and every time I have watched it since, I have cried in a way that would put Margot Robbie to shame. Nolan succeeded in capturing the scariness of American nationalism both in the ease with which the decision is made to drop the bomb (to the despair of petitioning scientists), and the ease with which a new enemy is created through Mccarthyism.

Nolan himself created an enemy out of Warner Bros in 2021 when criticising their new HBO Max streaming service. He was so critical that he gave Oppenheimer’s distribution rights to Universal rather than Warner Bros. This decision, perhaps, caused Warner Bros to move their tentpole film of the summer, Barbie, to the same weekend as Oppenheimer. Rather than creating the monopoly on the box office weekend that they intended, both films performed well at the box office because of the Barbenheimer trend. Barbie had the biggest opening weekend for a female director whilst Oppenheimer has already surpassed Nolan’s previous film Tenet in ticket sales after two weeks.

                These successes demonstrate how social media can both give and take. The criticism of the films, whether valid or not, gained significant traction. Ben Shapiro’s forty minute rant has gained 2.3 million views on Youtube. A comment on Twitter about the underrepresentation of Japanese voices in Oppenheimer gained 75k likes and many more interactions. On the more positive side of things (and one of the reasons I have left my room), social media has effectively countered Warner Bros’ attempt at undermining Nolan’s box office presence. In the wake of both the writing and acting strikes, which have affected both films’ promotional runs, the crazy event that is Barbenheimer suggests that the audience has more agency in which films it chooses than movie executives would believe. A movie populated by AI writers and AI actors is not an artistic feat, but both these movies are. Unless, of course, you’re Ben Shapiro.