Transcript of Interview conducted with  Owen Kingston, artistic director for Parabolic Theatre. He also writes and acts in his immersive shows.

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Emma:       It’s interesting what you’re saying about things not being immersive, I went to see Rift_’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream and it was really good, the acting was amazing but it started off as immersive but then it felt like the bit in the middle where they’re in the wood was site specific kind of buried within immersive.

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Owen:       Well, what do you call immersive?

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Emma:       Oh, that’s what I was going to ask you!

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Owen:      Well no, you’re using the word. Everyone uses that word differently which is a big problem

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Emma:       I think for me immersive is when as an audience member you are actively within the piece for the majority of the performance, you’re not just sat watching unless you choose to do that. Sometimes with some Punchdrunk stuff you are more an active witness. I think that’s where I am with that, I suppose I’m still trying to define it. What about you?

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Owen:        You and the rest of the world. I think, I would say there’s many different ways of doing it, there’s many ways of being immersive so I would resist a definition that is all encompassing. But when I look at immersive theatre, I have a checklist of different things and I want to see a good majority of those things present if I’m going to call it an immersive piece.

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That would include but be by no means limited to some form of audience agency so you’re able to decide what you do and where you go, something where audiences have action so you make contact with the performance in some way, it doesn’t necessarily need to be verbal or physical but you have a connection with the performance that you wouldn’t get sitting from a distance where we have the conceit that you cannot be seen.

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I would say you need to feel that you are part of the world of the show, that you are part of the world of the story and that means inhabiting the same space as the performers and inhabiting the same space as the story so you do not sit in a different place and watch the world of the story at a distance, you are in it. That can be a design thing, but it doesn’t have to be, it can be sharing the space with the performers but that on it’s own doesn’t necessarily constitute an immersive experience in my opinion.

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You need to see a package of stuff around it, I think that branching on a non-linear narrative is often an important thing but it doesn’t have to be but it’s one of those things on the checklist that would make me think, ok, that this is something different to conventional theatre.

Not sitting still and watching something, it needs to be a participatory experience even if the limit of participation is just having the freedom to move where you want. I think being lead around a series of scenes by the nose doesn’t constitute an immersive experience for me. But also what I would call an immersive carousel show is borderline not really immersive at all. Where you have a set series of scenes and the audience enter every fifteen minutes and they cover what I would call a carousel.

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Emma:        staggered audiences.

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Owen:       Yes, I mean, just because it has a staggered entry doesn’t make it an immersive show you know. And there are other things as well but they’re the biggest things. You know you see, the things that annoy me, The Bridge Theatre with their A Midsummer’s Night Dream or for that matter Julius Cesar billing that as an immersive theatre show to me is a load of old sh*t. Right, it might be very good, it might have elements of it that sort of maybe play a little bit with immersive theatre practice but that is not an immersive theatre show and they should know better than to advertise it as such. Of all the people out there in theatre land who don’t need to tag the immersive buzzword onto it you’d think it would be f*cking The Bridge Theatre with all of their huge star draw potential. So that really winds me up seeing things like that because it devalues what all the rest of us who are actually dedicating our entire lives and companies to a completely different medium to conventional theatre it devalues what we’re doing completely and it says we’re doing the same thing and you’re not and I see companies even companies like Les Enfants Terribles who made you know the Alice show that people go on about

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Emma:       Yes, that’s debatable as immersive isn’t it.

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Owen:          I think that’s borderline not immersive theatre. It’s very well designed

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Emma:       It was beautiful

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Owen:         It’s a carousel, you go around a series of scenes. There’s no agency whatsoever, yes you’re walking around inside the world of the show and you have some interaction so yeah it sort of is immersive theatre but I think its very sh*t immersive theatre to be honest. And when I went to see it the actors looked bored. They just look bored. They look like they want to shoot themselves in the head because they’ve done the same fucking scene like fifty times that day, you know. And when you see and you hear some stories coming out of that as well. That they designed it so poorly that actors didn’t have access to a toilet for eight hours at a stretch and they had to go to the toilet in a litter box. Like genuinely that was something that I heard happened in that production so I get annoyed with companies that are essentially conventional companies that are trying to cash in on the immersive buzzword because they think it will make them a few extra quid. It probably will make them a few extra quid but it devalues the rest of the business for everybody else. That’s my little rant. Rant over.

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Emma:       No, I agree. And do you think that’s a problem with, when it gets commercialized, when things get to big. Obviously Punchdrunk has done that very well

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Owen:         They’ve done it with a lot of integrity

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Emma:       But you would say that Les Enfants has not.

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Owen:         Yeah, I don’t think they’ve done it with a huge amount of integrity and I think the bad truth about this is that they’ve got a big budget, and a big budget does not make immersive theatre well.

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Emma:       no

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Owen:         You know, but it’s not just about commercialization I think it’s about, you can make a big commercial project with an awful amount of integrity and Punchdrunk have done that and they’ve done that here with Gatsby you know. I think it’s about cashing in. It’s about abusing the buzzword. When I first started working in theatre which was about twenty years ago, physical theatre was the big buzzword, everybody and their mum had a physical theatre company you know and they wouldn’t f*cking shut up about. And actually when Punchdrunk started, it started as a physical theatre company not as an immersive. Immersive theatre wasn’t even a thing then.

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Emma:       So did Les Enfants didn’t they?

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Owen:         Yeah, yeah they did, immersive theatre wasn’t even a thing and literally everybody, everybody was starting a physical theatre company and it’s exactly the same problem, you know. Everyone sees that the popular thing is immersive theatre so everybody and their mum starting an immersive theatre company and half of them aren’t really doing that with any kind of integrity or any kind of academic nous. Honestly, it’s hard creating good immersive theatre. It’s a 47-magnum world and you get people with 22 caliber minds trying to play in it and you can tell when that happens. So yeah. That is problematic. But there’s a lot of good stuff and navigating and finding the good stuff is worth a bit of effort, it’s not always the big companies that are producing the really good stuff.  Sometimes it is. I would rate Punchdrunk very highly and I think Immersive Ensemble has done a cracking job as well here and they’re pretty big now and they’ve got their own building now and they’re doing very well. But I think there’s a lot of smaller companies that are producing some really quality work and that’s not really being seen and not getting the attention it deserves.

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Emma:       You could say that about all genres of theatre

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Owen:         Yeah, you can, you can.

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Emma:       One problem I read about is that sometimes the lack of a narrative is an issue for people in that companies haven’t considered the journey within the piece, even if for example with Punchdrunk, even if you’re not on a pure narrative journey, even with Punchdrunk you do end up in a place, you do go on an emotional experience.

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Owen:         It’s a deconstructed narrative, you experience it in a disjointed and out of order kind of fashion which is why they keep doing Woyzeck because that is what Woyzeck is. And it suits their style of immersive theatre, suits that play really well, but it works with other stuff just as well and it’s interesting. Yeah, I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem, I think what’s the problem is when there is an absence of narrative altogether.

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Emma:       yeah, all visuals

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Owen:         There was a show here called The Swell Mob, it was on here and went to Edinburgh. It was very narrative thin, again it was a physical theatre company dipping its toe into immersive theatre. And they didn’t do a great job of it. But people enjoyed it, that’s the main thing. I wouldn’t rate it massively highly on that scale because where’s the story, you know, there wasn’t much of a story.

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Emma:       Does it become more of an art piece then, and do you think there’s a big difference between going to see performance art.

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Owen:         For me theatre is about storytelling and if you don’t have a story…

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Emma:       You shouldn’t be here

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Owen:         honestly yeah, f*ck off. You know. Take the prancing about and take it somewhere else. People will disagree with that. Let them.

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Emma:       Fair enough

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Owen:         I mean I come from a political theatre kind of background, that’s always been my life. I decided I wanted to be a theatre director when I was sixteen. I was reading Brecht and I was like; this is what I want to do. So Parabolics version of immersive theatre is a, an extension of that twentieth century political theatre practice. Using interactive techniques to try and achieve the aims of some of those practitioners whose aims never got achieved in their lifetimes really. I think we do that; I mean Brecht famously said he wanted theatre to be more of a boxing match and I think we achieve that. We achieve that with For King and Country with the Parliamentary sequences in that because the audience full on argue with each other in a wonderful way. About like, political issues that are dated but have a modern relevance. You know by abstracting the story and looking at it through a lens of 1940’s politics you’re really just looking at exactly the same problems that you see today but you’re doing it with a level of abstraction in place that allows you to address it without the baggage of modern political thoughts.

 

Emma:       And the personal.

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Owen:         Yeah, so that I think is hugely powerful. But that’s just our little kind of package of immersive theatre practice I guess that’s what we’ve focused on. I think what Punchdrunk are doing take essentially Artaud’s theory to the next level. You know, Artaud wanted to achieve all these wonderful things and he ended up making a few sh*t plays that got reviewed really badly and he went off and went mad and died. So his  personal career pretty much a failure but if you read the theory and if you read all his stuff about theatre of cruelty and all the manifesto for what wanted to achieve even though his own practice got nowhere close to achieving that. If you look at what Punchdrunk achieve in their shows and how they employ mask and how they employ physical theatre and that heightened sense of emotional realism. They basically achieve everything that Artaud set out to achieve but never got anywhere with because he didn’t think about the possibility of the audience and the actor inhabiting the same space. None of those twentieth century practitioners really thought about that apart from possibly Grotowski to some extent but even Grotowski preserved the idea of a fourth wall, he preserved the idea of, his definition of theatre is that you have to have an actor and an audience and you look at someone like Boal who takes that a little stage further and says well maybe the audience member can be the spect-actor well we take that another stage further still, we’re in forum theatre, the audience member is given the chance to look at a scene from the outside and then suggest changes to that scene which resonate with the political changes that they want to see and is possibly given the opportunity to step into that scene and try and effect those changes for themselves but all in a very formalized manner which still contains the trappings of conventional theatre. What we do is we strip that away completely and we start from the point of view that you are in this and you have the agency and capacity to alter it the way you see fit. Go. And that, our starting point really is Boal end point, in that regard.

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Emma:       Do you think that’s because our sense of the individual is so much stronger? Do you think it’s harder to break the fourth wall if you’re sense of the individual is less strong?

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Owen:         Ah, I just think it’s about having thought of the possibility that the audience and the actor can inhabit the same space. You know, that was, nobody thought of that. From ancient Greek times to the late twentieth century just nobody thought of that. Theatre by its definition kept the two things separate and it took groups like Punchdrunk to come along and tear that rulebook up.

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Emma:       What about something like, with pantomime, where the audience are encouraged to join in?

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Owen:         I think that hindered it, because the minute, because it’s audience participation. When I first started doing immersive theatre people used to say to me, oh I don’t like audience participation. So immediately if you put, in this country, the actor and the audience in the same space interacting, the only frame of reference anybody had for that was pantomime. Therefore, nobody wanted to do it because they didn’t want to make a pantomime. So it was outside of the realms of serious theatre because it was audience participation.

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Emma:       Childlike

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Owen:         Yeah, yeah. So I think it hindered more than it helped. Nobody thought that in a serious show, you know if you want to make a serious political point bringing the audience into the same space as you, because of their frame of reference for that they would instantly think it would just make it farcical and silly. I think one of the biggest things that Punchdrunk have as a legacy is enabling that to happen in a way that was very serious and almost horror driven serious, scary serious.

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Emma:       yeah, creepy

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Owen:         Because then it gives you a different kind of reference for it. So yeah, I don’t think it’s about individualism at all, I think it’s just purely about. It’s easy for us to look back now and say why didn’t you do that, just in the same way it’s easy for the guy who invented electric theatre lighting to be like well why didn’t you stick that in a couple of years earlier, well because you didn’t.

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Emma:       Do you think that, with Punchdrunk and most of the immersive shows I’ve seen, they have a very dreamy like vibe going on but I kind of got the impression from watching little clips of your work and just reading reviews that you’ve managed to not be like that at all, which I thought was quite interesting because I guess for me a lot of immersive stuff has that surreal quality and I wondered what you thought about that?

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Owen:         I think it’s great and I really enjoy that kind of work and we have done that with some of our work. It’s all about what kind of show you want to make I think and what you want to achieve with what you want to make. And so, you suit your induction into the show to the content of the show itself. So if we’re gonna have a show where we’re expecting the audience to sit down and have a political argument about whether or not you use gas on your enemies you don’t do that by bringing them through a nice dream like world in a mask because it doesn’t make any sense. So you create. It’s all about setting the expectations. Because immersive theatre can be so many different things. One thing I didn’t say earlier that, the thing that annoys me more than anything else, more than any f*cking b*llsh*t conventional theatre company jumping on the immersive bandwagon, the thing that annoys me more than anything else is the immersive f*cking bar. It’s just a themed bar. It’s a bar with some décor and a couple of waiters dressed up. But they call it immersive and that trains audiences badly. Because if you get someone who shows up for Gatsby and they’re expecting a 1920s Great Gatsby themed bar they behave very badly for a show that you’re expected to watch and maybe participate in a little bit.

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Emma:       people think it’s a p*ss up.

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Owen:         We’ve have huge problem with that in the past in this venue, it’s less of a problem in the shows that I’ve done but it’s still a problem.

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Emma:       Is that because it’s a smaller audience?

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Owen:         smaller audiences and a different way of marketing

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Emma:       A different vibe isn’t it and I guess also with Gatsby people expect the crazy party don’t they?

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Owen:         Yeah, you come to The Great Gatsby and you expect to buy a bottle of champagne and you expect, you expect to dance the Charleston, there are certain ticks in your head that you want to tick off and the show does provide that. But because of these themed bars that call themselves immersive people see Oh it’s an immersive great Gatsby thing and they expect that they can just show up and drink and f*ck around. And that’s not the point, it’s still a theatre show and it’s really difficult to make people understand that if their soul experience of the buzzword immersive is going into a themed bar and drinking cocktails.

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Emma:       Yeah, the themed club. With also, I was going to ask, in the Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia they talk about the bar being really important as a space to almost process what you’ve been through. What do you think about that?

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Owen:         I think that’s important for their practice because of what their show throws up, the way Punchdrunk work is that they create very physically intense and, I’ve worked a little bit for Punchdrunk. They make very physically and viscerally intense scenes, everything is very heightened. They do what it says on the tin. You come out of a Punchdrunk show feeling punchdrunk, you’re reeling. So, having the bar space to go and decompress when you need it is important for them. Our stuff is intense but it’s not intense in the same kind of way. Our stuff it’s cerebrally intense. We often do have a bar attached to the show and it does give people an outlet if they really need it but we don’t really want them to take that outlet unless they are particularly nervous or anxious personalities.

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Emma:       I think I would find being in the room downstairs having to make like big decisions with a group of people, especially with people I didn’t know, I’d probably find that more intense than the Punchdrunk shows but I don’t know, obviously I haven’t been.

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Owen:         Yeah, some people do, definitely. Some people would say that’s the case, it’s certainly just as exhilarating and the adrenaline rush is real, the, I think, there is one. If you’re going to craft an immersive theatre piece you have to craft it, it has to be bespoke. You have to look at what it is you want your audience to experience and you have to work backwards from there. And, you have to put in place in order to deliver that experience, you can’t just sort of take someone’s practice off the shelf and expect to layer your own narrative on top of it and expect it to all work. Because it won’t, you know. There are different phases to an immersive show. I think there’s what I’d call the induction phase which is the most important of all which is when you are introduced to the world of the show that can last anything from ten minutes to say forty-five minutes, depending on the length of the show but also depending on what it is that you need the audience to take on board. It can last the majority of the show and still be fun, you know. We tend to look at, for our work we tend to use a lot of story structure theory in order to deliver an emotionally reliable experience, so we give our audiences way more agency than anyone else working in this field. We put the decisions about the outcomes of the show firmly in the audience’s hands and our actors are very good and they pivot to whatever is needed the rule is we never refuse a reasonable inworld request. So, if the audience decides that they think something ought to happen and it makes sense in the context of the world and the story that they are building we will run with that as far as we possibly can. So to give a concrete example in For king and country we had an audience that got really fixated on the idea of trying to assassinate Hitler, which is not part of the show as we imagined it but they were really fixated on it and they weren’t just pissing about they actually really wanted to try and achieve that for good story reasons within the narrative of the show that they were achieving and so on the fly we just alter the show around them to make that stuff happen. So, they wanted the military to come up with a plan to assassinate Hitler, fine. I’m upstairs, the cast in the room and I’m upstairs, it’s usually me upstairs, somebody’s upstairs sort of game’s mastering the show I suppose from behind the scenes. So I need to come down in costume and I need to pivot this because everyone else is spinning all the plates that they’re spinning so I come down as a naval officer which is the costume I wear when I come into the room and give them a briefing on operation Hammerdown which was the name we came up for an operation to assassinate Hitler and I laid out what the plan was and I explained to them that it’s very unlikely to work, these are all the potential problems and we let the Parliament vote on it and they voted to do it. So, we then span a whole sequence of story out of that which for them was incredible because they’re like this is changing around us as we do it. That show, all our shows are about trying to create a believable world that you are really inhabiting and that your thoughts and decisions will affect that world and that is a hugely powerful thing for an audience but what it does as well is that it fills that political theatre need to actually give the audience the opportunity to see the change they want to make and then implement the change they want to make and then see the consequences of that. We did two For King and country shows, one set in 1941, one set in 1944, both in this alternative history timeline of Britain being invaded by Nazis. In the 1944 one a big part of the show was the German’s have come up with a weapon of mass destruction, what exactly this was changed from show to show because the two shows were linked so if you saw 1941 in the afternoon and then came back in the evening you would see the consequences of what happened in that show play out in the evening. So there was always a weapon of mass destruction that the German’s had invented but exactly what it was dependent upon that first show, in this particular incidence the German’s had built a nuclear  missile early which is historically, if you follow the…

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Emma:       could have happened

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Owen:         could have happened. The challenge for the audience was to try and neutralize this weapon before it was used and that was just one of many things that were coming up in that show. But we had, they did something we hadn’t anticipated, they said alright, rather than just trying to stop it from firing, can we retarget this, to fire it at Germany. We were like, we never thought of that but yeah, that’s a cool idea. we’ll run with that. And we had to improvise an ending to that show based on them achieving that, which we never really anticipated, was going to happen. But for them mind-blowing stuff because they were like we had that cool idea and we said it’s never happened before and they wouldn’t believe us initially and we said no, genuinely it’s never happened before.

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Emma:       Do you talk to them about that at the end?

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Owen:         Yeah, so we always hang around at the bar afterwards, the bars usually in the same space so in For King and Country there was a bar in the corner of the room

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Emma:       Do you have to stay in character for that?

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Owen:         No! At the end of the show we do a sort of curtain call. We thank everybody for coming. We stick around for some drinks, there’s a couple of things we ask them not to share because it spoils things, and then we say, just come and have a drink and they do because they’ve been mingling with the actors for two and a half hours anyway you know, and it’s actually quite nice for people to see them out of character.

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Emma:       Yeah people like that

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Owen:         Zoe who played Elsie Harvey whose sort of WAFF, radio operator in the show, she’s from Northumberland originally so she does the character in a Northumberland accent all the way through but she actually speaks London now. She’s been living down here a long time. And the usual response is oh wait, you’re not from there. It’s quite fun. It’s, I think it’s important to make those connections, we really value the audiences that come and see our stuff. And we get a lot of people coming back and back, so it’s nice to get to know them and meet them and get some feedback and find out what they thought and we have a substantial mailing list of people who come to see most of our work and keep coming back for new things and we’ve got to know quite a lot of them now. Punchdrunk had a similar thing, I think when you make theatre where the audience and the actors become physically and emotionally close during a show, it does kind of create a bond afterwards as well and people like to stick around and chat to each other and then for the actors it’s nice then to be able to decompress a little bit particularly in the shows been quite stressful which it often is and for the audience it’s an important comedown from the high of doing the show and there can be moments when the audience is in conflict with a character so it’s nice for them to be able to see the actor afterwards and see there’s no conflict and have a laugh with them. That’s quite important, I think, sometimes.

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Emma:       With that decompression, when someone enters the world of the play, you talk about the intro. Punchdrunk talk about thinking about the journey people have from the tube to the building and all of this stuff, do you think about that or do you not have to so much?

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Owen:         We do and we don’t it depends on the show, for some shows again it highly depends on the content of the show, there is no one size fits all approach and I think if you try and take a one size fits all approach one of two things happens, either your work just doesn’t work or you end up making the same thing on repeat.

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Emma:       imitation

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Owen:         You imitate yourself endlessly. One of the things I think Punchdrunk have done a little bit is they have solidified their practice almost too much. So, they will always have, there are certain things they talk about it, you have to do it this way because this is how it works. I’m like well you could actually make the whole thing work slightly differently and then you wouldn’t have to do that, you could try out this instead. they don’t seem to have the confidence in that. I think Punchdrunk partly stumbled across some of the stuff, the use of masks were much more powerful I think than they initially thought they would be, and so to a certain extent I think sometimes with Punchdrunk there is almost a superstitiousness of where we don’t want to fiddle with that because we might break the whole thing if we do. Their shows are magical, and they work beautifully. For our work we tailor it very much for what we do so we’ve created several different styles of show so there’s a broad range of feeling. The most popular stuff we’ve done are certainly been what I call the crisis management shows so For King and Country was the first of those and I think probably still the best actually. I’m really proud of that show For King and Country, it was quite magical but we’ve created a sequel to it that we made crisis what crisis that we set during the seventies which is coming back this autumn, we’re announcing that in a couple of weeks. It’s called crisis what crisis and it’s about the winter of discontent and the fall of the Labor government. We did that on in Croydon initially. That show again is a crisis management show but it’s a different kind of crisis, instead of the Nazis it’s Thatcher. You know, it’s a thinly veiled Brexit allegory. It’s all about trying to stop the country from falling apart and descending into chaos and it’s ideal for anybody who thought they could do a better job of Brexit really. Come see that show and you’ll find out how hard it is. It’s, we’ve had a lot of people interested in that, which was nice. But then we’ve also done other things completely differently, the first show we did was called Morning Star was much more like a Punchdrunk show in some ways, it was much more creepy, it was very physically driven. It was horror. The first proper run of that was in the basement of Croydon town hall which is a terrifically creepy environment and that show has passed into legend a little bit now, it was terrific fun. But that was totally different again so actually the journey to the venue for that was important, we built a whole kind of Mythos around that show and we built another one around Land of Nod which mostly took place outside.

 

Emma:       Is that the show about knife crime

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Owen:         so that’s a totally different show again, it took place in the present. So again, the journey to and from the show was really important. And the show started long before you got to the venue. there were different email communications and different audience members had a different pre-show experience. One person every night, the night before the show we would deliver to their house at three in the morning roughly a flower with a note that we would leave on a doorstep or in a porch, anything we could get access to. So, they would wake up before the post arrives, if they wake up before the post arrives, they would find this thing had been delivered in the middle of the night and there would be a little note saying ‘be careful tonight’. And we freaked a lot of people out.

 

Emma:       Did it ever stop anyone coming?

 

Owen:         No, no, it did confuse a lot of people but obviously when they arrived at the show most people they connected it with the show, because it was all about this stabbing and it started with a police briefing and in the police briefing they showed this flower that had been left on the body and it was exactly the same kind of flower. And at that point if you were watching the audience watching the briefing you would see that person go (gesticulates) but nobody ever said anything to the police officer characters which I thought was really interesting. So yes, we did all kinds of things like that, we also visit, for another part of that same show we would visit someone’s house and take pictures of the outside of the house and use it in the show.

 

Emma:       did people have to give their permission?

 

Owen:         No, we just did it, no one every complained. It’s not like we’re sharing information with other people, it’s just applying to them and we warned people in the booking confirmation, we were taking your email address and your phone number because we might use them in the show and your address and that sort of thing so people were aware that something was possible. But it was a really intense show that actually, it was a lot of fun. And treating a really serious subject. The ending of that show was the arrest of the- you discover across the show that the suspect has stabbed their brother but they really did not, they were not aware that that’s what they were doing, they’d been tricked into something really horrible and there was a huge really dark conspiracy behind what was going on. What we were trying to highlight how young people get duped into getting way over their heads by really quite scary conglomerations of people working at the high level of drug dealing who never get found, never get caught, if they do it’s really rare. That was part of what the show was about and what we were trying to get at. And so, for some of the audience part of that experience was to have the frighteners put on you by those people and realize just how untouchable they are. So there was one particular character who only one audience member every show would ever see and nobody else would ever know she was a character and she represented that and she would phone one of the audience on their mobile during the show ask to meet them somewhere and then she would take them to the ending , give them this whole spiel and basically warn them off doing anything to reveal the people she was waiting for and take them to the place and stand with a beautiful view of the guy as he got arrested and the guy was running away from the police and he’d see her and stop, timing was a nightmare but it worked nearly every time when it worked it was gorgeous because he’d be running along this path and she would just appear upon this bridge above him and he’d just stop and look at her and then the police would catch up with him and they’d nick him and he would not even listen to them because he’d be like I’m done because he knew who she was. And then the audience member would be with her at that moment

 

Emma:       complicit in it

 

Owen:         Yeah, and we did all kinds of fun stuff like that. But those are totally different to For King and Country, I’m just really interested in the different things that immersive theatre can achieve, and lots of different sorts of practice. And yeah Punchdrunk’s interesting but there are a lot of other companies that are doing that kind of research, I guess.

 

Emma:       Do you think that it’s important that audiences get something like a token, do you think that makes the connection with the piece more powerful?

 

Owen:         Can do, yeah, but again I would avoid having a hard and fast rule. I had a guy from an Italian theatre company, he was a very nice chap really but he came to see For King and Country and he wanted to sit down with me afterwards and tell me how he thought it could be better and basically he just wanted to tell me how he did immersive theater and that that was the right way to do it, you know. And that in order to be more immersive you needed to have things that you could eat and smell and I just listened and nodded and smiled because clearly he just wanted to talk and some people just like to feel important and that’s fine. But I was like you don’t need any of this, you don’t need any of those things, those things can enhance an immersive show and I’m sure for his practice and the sort of show he’s making it makes a huge leap but it wouldn’t enhance For King and Country, sitting everyone down and making them eat something, it’s not going to enhance what we’re trying to achieve with that show, which is an entirely different sort of immersive theatre, you know. And I can see like for Punchdrunk shows the fact that the smells that surround every room it helps to evoke that dreamlike world but if you’re not trying to create that dreamlike world then you don’t have to fill your set with expensive Demeter fragrances because you’re just wasting your money, it might add a bit of value but it’s not essential. But this is why I say it’s a forty-seven-calibre world and you’ve got these twenty-two calibre minds who’ve read this stuff and try to implement everything they’ve read in one show. You have to design your experience to produce the effect that you’re looking to produce on your audience, there is no off the shelf model that is going to magically work for the thing that you want to make. You have to put in the effort to think through what the audience experience would be, prioritise the things that are going to make it work better for them and not, the big thing we do and I think people are just unaware of it but the big thing that we do is we use story design principles that are used in film and television to craft the narratives for our shows. I’ve got a bit of a background in film and tv writing and having the narrative beats fall at the right time and in the right way is so important for the audience to feel that the show was satisfying. And so often with immersive theatre because things are left to the audience or because the audience have agency those narrative beats don’t fall in the right place and that’s when you get the accusations towards Punchdrunk of that didn’t make any sense or people saying oh well I didn’t get the story, what they really mean by that because they probably did get some story what they mean by that is that it didn’t feel satisfying because it didn’t tie together in the way that you expect a story to tie together because we have these unconscious expectations of what a story presented to us theatrically ought to look and feel like and those things have been heighted and sharpened more by film and television than they have by conventional theatre particularly for people who don’t go to the theatre a lot so we try and build that into our shows. So for us it’s a tightrope between giving an audience agency and ensuring that narrative beats fall at the right place and where the agency is big enough to effect the narrative of the story that all possible outcomes can never the less fulfil a series of satisfying narrative beats that make sense, now that is hard, like it’s really hard and most people don’t even try because they don’t even think about it. But it’s really important because if you want the audience to come out afterwards with their minds blown thinking that was incredible how did they do that, a huge part of that is making it feel like a satisfying narrative.

 

Emma:       Is that where the improve comes in?

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Owen:         No, it’s where structure comes in. It’s structuring it and allowing the improvisation to come in within the structure because without structure improvisation is boring. It’s really f*cking boring Have you ever been to a sh*t improve night? People just sort of blurrh. Or if you’ve ever been to an acting class where people do an improve and you just want to go home after half an hour, people just talking round the same subject over and over because they’re trying to fill the time, without structure improvisation is sh*t. What we do is put a really tight really interesting structure in there that has enough of a framework wiggle room that you can completely breakout of it with the content but the narrative structure, the narrative beats, the things that you want people, want the audience to feel at certain points stay the same, how can I give a good example of that. Part of it, the most complicated it got was For King and Country two where you had essentially four endings, well there were tonnes of ending, but there were four structural endings, there was the win where the audience managed to achieve all of the objectives set for them beautifully, or nearly all of them and they pull off a really positive outcome. There was the partial win where they maybe get most of the objectives set for them and the outcome is positive but maybe they haven’t got everything and it’s tinged with a sense of “ah but we missed this or missed that” there’s the partial loss which is basically the opposite of that where you know you’ve f*cked it but you got some stuff right and there was the total loss where you’ve just f*cked it and there’s nothing anyone can do and it’s gone really wrong and you’re left knowing that and the thing there you have is you have a tragic ending and a heroic ending. And so any film writing theory will tell you that if you’re aiming for a tragic ending your beats need to be different  for if you’re aiming for a heroic ending so you have to have a mechanism by which the right beats can fall early enough and you know which ending you’re heading towards and you make it feel satisfying because actually loosing can be really enjoyable if it has the sense of inevitability, if it has the sense of everything you’ve expect out of a tragedy. Similarly, the heroic ending is only really going to feel good if the odds against you feel substantial enough and you can see the place where it’s gone wrong. At the simplest most basic level your midpoints ought to be the opposite of where your ending is heading so we the actors need to know where the ending is heading so we can prepare for it so by the midpoint we need to know that so we deliver the right midpoint based on the first half of the show and then the rest of the show we know where it’s heading towards, it’s just a mechanism of how you get there and how you get there is entirely down content wise to that the audience do but you know that there are certain beats you have to hit in certain places in order to deliver the right theme.

 

Emma:       Has it ever been that you’re all acting and then some of the actors are on a slightly different page to the others at say, the midpoint.

 

Owen:         They’re really good at staying on the same page, they’re really good. And the mechanisms built into the show that allow you to do that and to do it in character. There’s ways that you can keep abreast of where everything is so in the crisis management shows things are broken up into, there’s usually an act structure which also equates to turns in a game, so we aim at a five act structure because I like five act screen play writing. And time wise the beats need to fall at the right time in the show to feel like the show is telling a cohesive story, so in a screen play the midpoint should fall at page fifty-five. Like most screen plays, if you listen to people like Blake Snyder a screen play should be a hundred and ten pages, on the nose. At fifty-five pages on the nose, that should be your mid-point, you know, and the right emotional beat has to hit on page fifty-five. And all the other things around it. I love Blake Snyder’s work and if you follow his beat sheet each one has a specific timing to it so you know x minutes into the story this beat falls and there’s a little bit of wiggle room obviously there is but he would always say that if you can get it right bang on then it delivers the most satisfying result. And he’s right. And actually we apply that to immersive theatre, so we’ve created our own variation of that beat sheet that works for immersive theatre because you can’t completely map something from film into theatre, it doesn’t follow but we aim to hit certain beats at certain points to deliver the sense of a well told story, even if the exact content of that story is largely determined by what the audience do and we don’t always plan for it but once you get used to thinking in structure rather than in specifics you can deliver something that fulfils the structural requirements based on what the audience have suggested, always. There’s never really any reason not to. And so the guys get used to thinking like that and put it in at the right moment that isn’t to say that sometimes things don’t fuck up a bit but providing you stick mostly to that structure, even if you don’t follow it completely right, even if things do go a bit a rye the audience never the less feel the fact that this is a story well told, it’s subconscious and subliminal and they can see, you know that’s the old Hollywood adage, give me the same only different. People want the same, the standard dramatic story structure given back to them, they just want the content to be varied so if you just vary the content you’ve got…

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Emma:       A winner

 

Owen:         Yeah, yeah. That’s the theory and in practice it does work and usually where there is a problem where there are things that are misfiring there is a structure problem so with crisis what crisis which we threw together very quickly we had a couple of moments in that in previews where we went shit we have a structure problem we didn’t even notice, we start seeing the audience slump or something misfiring you’re like “Oh yeah because” fine and you just fix it.

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Emma:       Do you think it’s important with immersive theatre, obviously with traditional theatre they change and learn new things from the audience but do you think with immersive theatre do you think it’s particularly to have a week or so where you’re learning and adapting your structure with an audience?

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Owen:         I think it’s really desirable. Preview time is gold. Because the longer you can preview things without having the close scrutiny of press the better because it will just be better. Anything that requires the audience interaction to live cannot be rehearsed without an audience. And we’ve got a big pool of actors and mates from other companies and be test audiences for us, but the problem with that is that it’s skewed, it’s not a fair test because they’re not coming completely cold to it. And also when you know them it’s slightly different to people you don’t know. So actually the first real test isn’t until your first show. Something that I always try and do is prototype something on a small scale and then once it really works boost it up to the big scale so we will often do at least a week or a couple of weeks really quietly and we’ll just send it out to our mailing list or post it on the Punchdrunk Lovers group to get people who are going to be friendly to us but never the less, who will appreciate being let into something early and won’t let that cloud their judgement of that before the press come in. Because a lot of press are very hostile to immersive theatre as well, you know, press you love conventional theatre, there’s a real snobbishness against immersive theatre from the mainstream industry, they look at us as the weird kids of British theatre or they equate us with all the immersive bars out there, the cash in kids. There’s a real hostility and a lot of jealousy because we get big audiences who pay a lot of money to see our work and who leave very happy.

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Emma:       And often people who go and see immersive don’t go and see traditional plays.

 

Owen:         Because it’s f*cking boring,

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Emma:       well…

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Owen:         who wants to see someone’s home brewed production of The ‘f*cking’ Seagull when you’ve seen it fifty f*cking thousand times before. Is that going to be better than everybody else’s you’ve ever seen before? No it’s not, it’s going to be the same old sh*t. I’m really bored with conventional theatre. But I came from that background and I ran a little theatre in Croydon for a few years and that had been my dream really, just to sort of run my own venue and program it myself and I got really disillusioned by it because it was a lot of fringe theatre and a lot of sh*t fringe theatre and we needed it to survive financially and I was just depressed by the whole scene and I was just thinking I don’t really want to do this anymore and then I saw Punchdrunk and I was late to the party with Punchdrunk, I didn’t, the first Punchdrunk show I saw was The Drowned Man.

 

Emma:       Me to

 

Owen:         You know, I’d been working in the theatre industry for years, I’d heard about them and I had that same snobbishness towards them, that same jealousness, of  everyone raving about them: “Oh it’s mind-blowing” “Is it really mind-blowing, I’m not sure.”

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Emma:       Is it really theatre

 

Owen:         “Is it really theatre,” I’ve had that, I know what it’s like to be in that position, but I went to see it and it ruined me for everything else. I had a friend that was in it and I’m so glad that he pestered to go because if he hadn’t. He put a post on Facebook saying ‘It’s the best thing I’ve ever been in and if you haven’t seen it yet I question why we are even still friends on Facebook’ but I’m glad he posted that or I might not have gone otherwise, I might have just let it slip, I was busy you know busy with other things I might have let it slip by and I went and it blew my head off and I was ruined for anything else, I didn’t want to make any other sort of theatre, I went back to the sort of theatre and I just didn’t want to be there and I’d had enough, I’d had enough. And I started experimenting around with some of the stuff I’d seen at Punchdrunk modelled at a really small scale way before eventually just jacking in that whole thing and being like no I’m gonna start a new company, we’re just gonna make this kind of theatre now and I’m gonna push it all kinds of directions and see what we can do with it. And I feel now it’s a little bit like the golden age of Hollywood, you know, a bit like the 1920s, the 1930s of Hollywood where everything is possible and people are only really just starting out and the technology is still in its infancy and the, people’s understanding of what we’re doing with these techniques is still in their infancy but actually it’s boomtown time, people are making stuff all over the place and new things are being discovered every day and new innovations are happening all the time and I work really hard to keep up and see as many things as possible because actually there is some amazing work out there, there are some companies that are producing  brilliant things, you know, we’re just a small part in what we’re making and that excites me, that excites me massively.

 

Emma:       Do you think immersive is oversaturated?

 

Owen:         I think it’s oversaturated with sh*t. I think it’s oversaturated with bandwagon jumpers and immersive bars, yeah massively oversaturated and they all need to f*ck off and do something else. But it’s not oversaturated with people producing good work and there are still companies producing good work. If you haven’t discovered the gunpowder plotters yet, you should.

 

Emma:       Yeah I’ve seen that, I think it might have been on your twitter page because you’re going to do a talk at the immersive workshop

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Owen:         Yeah the Sandbox thing. The Gunpowder Plotters are a group of companies, we got together a few years back and we decided to get together and grow this thing together and it’s a wonderful thing, a wonderful group of companies, I would check out all of them, there’s a lot of very good work out there, yeah but I think in terms of oversaturation, it’s just the sh*t things, the themed bars and the cocktail experiences and the f*cking- ugh, it makes me want to puke. Sorry I’ve come across as really snobbish towards that now! And I appreciate the irony in that.

 

Emma:       Not at all! But with that, on your website you say if advertising companies want to work with you to get in touch, have you done some stuff with them?

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Owen:              I’m really picky about it

 

Emma:       Oh, ok cool. Well it’s interesting, I’m quite interested in the collaboration, would you do it very differently if you were say working with a brand?

 

Owen:            I would approach it as we get to create a cool show that showcases the brand, I wouldn’t want to do it if they just wanted us to put up some f*cking cocktail bar and have some actors wondering around in it. I don’t want to perpetuate that you know. So, if they’re actually genuinely interested in doing something really interesting and playing around with the form and doing something that could be really special, I’d be up all for that but I’m not making a themed bar for somebody who don’t care about theatre. And actually, somebody did approach us the other day, Kraken rum approached us to send us something the other day, they were asking me for actors and I’m not an agency. Like we can help you create something and engage actors as a part of that but if you want actors hold some fucking auditions, don’t bother me. I didn’t get a message back, I wasn’t that rude, I said it in a nicer way but I didn’t get a message back. So yeah, I don’t know. We haven’t bothered going to the arts council, we haven’t bothered with funding, there might be funding out there but I want to make the sort of work I want to make I don’t want to be, I don’t want to jump through someone else’s hoops that’s why I started my own company, to make the work I want to make, there’s too much hoop jumping with arts council funding, you know, you’ve got to have a disabled bloke a trans person and a lesbian and three black people and a Chinese person and I’m not against employing any of those people but I don’t want to have to shoehorn all of those agendas into something else, I just want to make the thing I want to make. And it’s not just that with the arts council there’s a lot of strings attached to the funding and there’s a lot of hoops you have to jump through just to get the funding in the first place and then even if you jump through all the hoops perfectly you’re still not guaranteed any money. As long as we can operate on a fully commercial model, I would like to stay like that because it gives us a lot of freedom.

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Emma:       An autonomy, yeah

 

Owen:            Yeah, get to make what we want to make. The golden age of theatre in the twentieth century was in communist countries. I don’t know if you ever noticed that.

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Emma:       no

 

Owen:            but nearly all of the big theatrical practitioners of the twentieth century, nearly all of them, came out of highly communist or

socialist framework, so you’ve got Brecht in east Germany whose essentially paid by the soviets, you’ve got Meyerhold, paid by the soviets, you’ve got Grotowski and the entire theatre laboratory was a communist endeavour and if he hadn’t had the theatre laboratory god there are so many things we would be lacking. Baul, south America not communist as such but there’s a strong socialist mantra to what he’s doing. Most of them are existing in very well publicly funded arenas. But they’re publicly funded arenas that don’t attach a lot of strings and conditions, you know. If you look into the history of the theatre laboratory, he had a space, he had a whole team of actors, they were all paid to just f*ck around. There was no requirement to create anything. They were just paid to experiment with theatre, and they lived day in, day out communally in the theatre and they just lived and breathed and eat and slept it. We’ve kind of done the same thing here it’s just we’re not getting paid by public money because there’s too many strings attached but there’s a huge public demand for the work and that’s what’s paying for it. So weirdly you’re getting in the twenty-first century the same sort of innovation but coming out of a hard-line capitalist model, which is bizarre actually. And that’s where you get associated with popularism, so a lot of theatre snobs will be like it’s far too popularist, there’s this sort of idea that it can’t be art if people are enjoying it and it makes money, if it’s too fun or if, this was the thing with For King and Country, it looked too fun and it made money so how can it possibly be art. Come and f*cking see it and then you’ll see how. Could we get critics in through the door, it was like pulling teeth trying to get critics through the door. And yet I think if they had come through the door, they’d have had their heads blown off. I think Punchdrunk had a similar problem early on but they managed to attract the National Theatre’s attention. That set them up. We haven’t had that yet, that hasn’t hit us, maybe it won’t but that’s…

 

Emma:       Do you think, you’ve talked about games immersive theatre and obviously the games industry has got so much bigger and mainstream, it’s not just nerds play games, it’s quite a mainstream thing for people to do now, do you think the games side of immersive theatre is going to get bigger and bigger.

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