Latest news with #immersiveTheatre
The Guardian
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Inside a deserted Melbourne shopping mall is a bizarre XR journey into psychosis
I've visited the inner-city Melbourne suburb of Footscray many times but last week I saw it in an entirely different light: as a nightmarish bizarro world, sort of real and sort of not. The concept of using art to reinvigorate disused spaces is far from novel, but it's been taken to compelling heights in The Door in Question, an intense – and at times deeply unsettling – 90-minute extended reality, or XR, production that blends immersive theatre, escape rooms, virtual reality and mixed reality (overlaying the real world with digital elements). Described by creator and director Troy Rainbow as 'an immersive journey into psychosis', The Door in Question was partly inspired by his own experience of psychosis as well as the experiences of his mother, who had schizophrenia. The 37-year-old artist used letters she wrote to him – reflecting 'her type of thinking, and the type of thinking I fell into' – to inform the core challenge of 'adapting delusional belief systems into narrative form'. The story centres around four delusional characters, each of which believe a man named Anton was killed in a different way. The word 'immersive' is bandied around a lot these days, but The Door in Question really is immersive, creating an enveloping experience that engages all the senses – including touch and smell. It begins in a small room in Metro West shopping centre – a largely unused complex with, as Rainbow puts it, 'a cachet of lost dreams feel about it'. After a brief guided meditation, I'm fitted with a VR headset, and emerge from the room to walk around the virtually altered centre, encountering peculiar objects that weren't there before. Some I'll see again later on, in physical rather than virtual reality – which blurs the actual and the unreal, and triggers a strange kind of deja vu. Trading my headset for a pair of headphones, I head on to the street, where a mysterious woman tells me stories about various locations around me while directing me around the block and into another building. Here I move through a series of surreal-looking rooms filled with old and decaying elements. There's a lab-like environment with a dentist's chair; a security room in which I have a conversation with myself via AI that imitates my voice; a grotty kitchen filled with broken and oddly placed things; and a creepy kids room, with plush snakes on the bed and a homemade board game. Throughout the experience, voices sprout up from unexpected places around me, achieved in part through directional speakers – 'so it actually sounds like a voice in your head', says Rainbow. These voices deliver bizarre and sometimes hysterical rants. A man talks about our soul becoming data and dissolving; a child speaks of divine miracles. As I move through these environments, I encounter strange pictures and written material – religious texts, cryptic notes scrawled on walls, typed documents in folders. It feels as if I'm inside a scary movie or video game. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning The Door in Question (which premiered in 2021, and has experienced several iterations before this current one) is powerful partly because of its intimate nature. Throughout the experience, the participant is alone – with the exception of an actor who follows them up the street, ensuring they head in the right direction – and alone with the thoughts in their head (plus all those crazy ones bouncing off the walls). The intimacy of the experience, coupled with the fact that each participant co-authors it, makes it feel very personal. All this requires a very different approach to storytelling from mediums with ringfenced fields of representation, such as film and traditional theatre. Beyond the obvious difference of interactivity, this kind of storytelling involves using space to reveal information, and establishing an interplay between narrative and location. Technology is crucial to pulling this off, and Rainbow says 'I work with the mindset that technology isn't the facilitator of the idea – it's a co-creator'. Finding the right real-world locations is also key, and using abandoned and dilapidated spaces is something Rainbow is passionate about: 'Why work against that to create something? Why not allow that to inform the experience?' he says. 'It'd be cool if there were more artistic experiences embedded in dormant spaces.' The Door in Question is playing at Metro West, Footscray until 29 June
Telegraph
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
London's latest immersive extravaganza is mind-scrambling – and not in a good way
It's hard to fault the intention behind London's latest immersive extravaganza – and given it's the pet project of the Georgian billionaire TV mogul Liana Patarkatsishvili one can certainly assume no expense has been spared. In its sights is the viral spread of misinformation and the algorithmic nature of knowledge in the digital age: both increasingly critical, and rich with immersive potential. But within about 20 minutes of this show – set inside a cavernous disused warehouse (formerly the paper store for News International) in Deptford – it's clear Storehouse has a cognitive crisis of its own. Have the creators been afflicted by a case of information overload, unable to discern precisely what their own project is about? Has a rogue chatbox been given access to the script? You have to wonder as the audience experience of Storehouse rapidly starts to resemble the slightly panicky, headachy feeling of being lost in a Reddit thread, buffeted by tangentially related but disparate plot strands that refuse to satisfyingly coalesce. The team behind it – which includes a staggering six co-writers – promises one of the most artistically ambitious large-scale theatre events to have ever been staged in the UK. Yet the show's scope and set-up will be familiar to anyone who has seen any of the numerous immersive shows that have sprung up in the last 15 years in the wake of Punchdrunk. Divided into groups, audiences are led inside the honeycombed interior of the eponymous Storehouse – a vast archive which, we are informed, was established in 1983 by four enigmatic visionaries to provide an analogue record of every post, meme, tweet and fact published on the internet. The hope of these founders – voiced, disappointingly intermittently, by Toby Jones, Kathryn Hunter, Meera Syal and Billy Howle – is that the archive will synthesise the morass of printed knowledge into a single noble truth about humanity. Yet the archive itself is under threat from unknown forces and the task of the audience is to find a way of preserving its ideals for future generations. At least I think that is the idea. Even the actors, which for my group included a bumbling book-binder and a suave sort of leader in perky striped trousers, at times didn't appear sure of what story they were meant to be telling. As is often the case with these shows, far more attention has been paid to the aesthetic experience than the dramatic execution. Alice Helps's set design is certainly impressive, featuring various tunnelled spaces that resemble the roots of trees or caves crammed with stalactites. There are rooms lined with old books, coloured lanterns that reveal 'truths' written onto the walls and whispering voices. There is a brief tantalising flirtation with an escape room-like puzzle involving books stained by a mysterious pattern, and an excellent wheeze involving those lanterns which, had anyone had the vision to do so, could have been developed into something richly pertinent to the show's own themes. Yet the audience has no real purpose. And the issues at stake are unclear: the plot involves a conspiracy that makes no sense, and it ends with an appeal to the audience to decide on what most gives them hope and to work towards a world full of that instead. Love, said someone. The touch of grass, another replied. Or, one might have added, a rigorous artistic response to one of the most pressing subjects of our age. Until Jun 29. Tickets: 0203 925 2998;
