This interview was more of a conversation in the bar between Kirsty Wyatt (an actor) and her husband Jake Wyatt and myself after Kirsty had performed in Lobster Frock’s The Pursuit of Success

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Emma:         Ok so tell me, not part of the overall experience

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Jake:           Yeah, in the waiting area before you go in

 

Emma:         The ikea café

 

Jake:             the ikea café where, also where you come out. There was like a little room where you could put your name down for to just go into, they’d put a song on spotify and through the ikea speakers

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Emma:         the sonos speakers

 

Jake:              Sorry the sonos speakers, you can buy them in the Ikea. At least 6 of those speakers in the room but other than that it was just mirrors, even the floor and the

ceiling. So you could just dance in the room for the song

 

Emma:        How did you find out about it.

 

Jake:             we saw other people going in and out and we just asked and he was like you can be the person after next

 

Emma:        That’s an immersive secret, I’m so sad. I wish I’d seen that

 

Jake:              Oh, well it wasn’t incredible

 

Emma:        Oh no, I’m upset for my dissertation, not whether it was incredible or not! So what else happened there?

 

Jake:             You just ask the guy at the door to play your song. He wasn’t in costume.

 

Emma:         Were there dancers in there with you??

 

Jake:             no, it was just us. In a room of mirrors

 

Emma:        What did you think of the actual dancers in the experience?

 

Jake:              The dance was one of my favourite bits. It wasn’t immersively good but it was theatrically good. The free croissants were also good

 

Emma:        free croissants? I didn’t get them?

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Jake:              did they not give you free tea and coffee

 

Emma:        No! I got nothing for free!

 

Kirsty:             I got free coffee and peppermint tea and croissants

 

Jake:              I got so many free croissants

 

Kirsty:             Jake just kept eating their cinnamon coffees. People steal those croissants! People go into Ikea and steal them in bulk because people love them so much.

 

Emma:        They could do a whole experience based on that! What did you think, was it immersive Kirsty?

 

Kirsty:             Yeah to an extent. I liked the sensory aspects of the different rooms

 

Emma:         So the rooms I really liked, the bits I felt were truly immersive were the meditation room

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Kirsty:              Yes, the cushiony one yeah

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Jake:             but wasn’t that reused from something

 

Kirsty:              but why does that matter

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Jake:              It doesn’t

 

Emma:         I didn’t know that it was reused

 

Kirsty:             Yeah it was, but it didn’t matter, it worked for that experience. Why

Jakes bringing that up is because I liked that room best in the last experience and it’s the same room I liked again.

 

Emma:         I understand what you mean though because sometimes when stuff is re-hacked in that way it can be very distracting, because you’re thinking, that’s from that other show and it can kill the environment. It can work if your stories are somehow connected. I liked the tree thing to

 

Kirsty:             Yeah it was very beautiful

 

Emma:        The man next to me didn’t want to hold my hand, he was very awkward about that.

 

Kirsty:              I thought that room was lovely, loads of people didn’t want to leave the cushiony room beforehand. Whereas I was like lets go, lets go through the mysterious door.

 

Emma:        Could you hear other people going through the experience ahead of you? That really annoyed me because I could hear them ahead of me and I had a big problem for that.

 

Kirsty:             I really didn’t’ like being in the holding room and after a while we were just talking awkwardly like, is this right, are we doing the right thing.

 

Emma:        we all started opening the doors and I thought, I’ll try that to and we were all trying the handles and my door opened

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Kirsty:              What?

 

Jake:             to like backstage

 

Emma:         It was just white canvas fabric. I was like I shouldn’t have done that

 

Kirsty:             You went into the tent space silly girl, you shouldn’t have done that

 

Jake:              Emma did happy whilst we did jealousy

 

Emma:        yeah turns out we had different recordings in the foot place.

 

Kirsty:             Yeah, yeah. It was lame.

 

Emma:        Yeah I thought maybe you guys had a different journey.

 

Kirsty:             Yeah because I’ve seen and performed a lot of immersive theatre I was very aware that was a holding space. The other people were getting anxious weren’t they “are we doing the right thing” and I had to say “no guys this is ok, we’re supposed to be here, we’re just waiting”

 

Emma:         we were really awkward

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Jake:             it must be to do with timings and multiply audiences

 

Emma:        yeah carousel, like on Alice

 

Kirsty:             It works very similar way to Alice though, they give you a binary choice, which is an illusion of choice and then you get taken on a track that you think is unique but itsn’t

 

Emma:        I think it needed to be a bit quicker and say “we’ll do one audience at a time” so that it wasn’t interrupted by other speakers

 

Kirsty:             No rather than a holding space they should have had an actual space. Like why did they have a holding space in the middle of the performance?

 

Emma:         I wander if that was to do with the fact that they had to advertise the speakers.

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Kirsty:              In which case it should have been more of a soundscape. They should have made more of that moment

 

Emma:        the only place the speaker was actually visible was in the meditation room.

 

Kirsty:             the problem through with these things is because  I’ve done so many I was like ooo it’s cushiony I’ll just gonna lie down and then the actor said you can all lie down now and I was like I’m already here guys.

 

Jake:             Sam Dunstan said these really interesting things about The Wolf of Wallstreet, apparently loads of people wanted to turn up and do loads of crazy sh*t

 

Kirsty:             Like in the wolf of wallstreet. So they prepared it in the style of Secret Cinema of actual scenes that you could see but in a promenade way not in a free form way but they didn’t want that. They wanted to shoot midgets out of canons. So they had to close and redo

 

Emma:        There was a similar thing when I went to The Great Gatsby, I know they’ve had problems but when I went there was a group of eighteen year old girls who were obviously a group on a birthday and they weren’t bad, they weren’t disruptive just a bit giggly and the actors were almost pre-empting them being awful “ladies, be quiet, listen to me” “come on ladies” he spoke to them loads of time and they weren’t even doing anything. But I think the premise is wrong really because if you invite people to a party they’re going to want to party.

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Kirsty:             Yes! Exactly! that’s what’s so brilliant about the Boomtown immersive experience because it embraces that chaous and uses it as a way to fuel the storyline and embrace the audience.

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Emma:        Yes “we’re in the chaotic world of the festival with this added layer”

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Pause

 

Kirsty:             the carousel one isn’t immersive it’s promenade

 

Emma:         Yes I would agree with that, you’ve got the immersive world, you’ve got the narrative but you haven’t got the agency. But I think that if these carousel ones they could organize them in a way where there was agency and make it seem very natural. But they don’t and no ones done that yet.

 

Kirsty:             that’s why I think that isn’t immersvive theatre, it’s promenade

 

Emma:         we went to Rift_ My sister and I, A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Alexandra Palace and it was kind of immersive and you knew you were a tv audience and then you got moved into the forest and then it became site specific within an immersive thing.

 

Kirsty:             then they should say that. It annoys me when I go to something and I’m told it’s immersive and it ends up being promenade

 

Jake:              or not even promenade. We went to that thing that was a meal and then your moved into a theatre space.

 

Kirsty:             Yeah the Swan Lake immersive experience

 

Jake:             Yeah you got given a seat to have a meal and then you got given a seat to watch a ballet

 

Kirsty:             it was terrible

 

Emma:        That’s not immersive! That’s just going to a theatre that has a restaurant attached to it!

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Kirsty:             Yeah, it was really good but it wasn’t what we expected which is why we were disappointed

 

Jake:              I think it was different, there are people in the immersive theatre world who have seen Punchdrunk and know what it can be with a fucking ridiculous budget that only Punchdrunk can do and then there are people like your sister who are coming in for the first time and are blown away by whatever it is because it’s not just sitting in a seat and watching a play.

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Emma:        Yeah but I took her to the Great Gatsby and she didn’t like it, even though to me on paper it was way more immersive she didn’t like the fact that she’d missed loads of it. She was like “what do you mean that I’m not seeing everything” she was really upset, she was kind of angry.

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Kirsty:             did you explain that a part of immersive theatre can sometimes be your unique experience

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Emma:         I did afterwards. She said about it Afterwards she thought it would be good as a stage play but bad as an immersive experience because so much is lost because you’re only at the party and subtext is no longer there.