RECORDED TRANSCRIPT:

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One thing that was pressed upon me was the audience journey, the audience emotional journey, for what it is that you’re writing about. So then for king and country, We looked at it and we worked out what are  the important emotional beats for  the audience and how should those beats turn. And then we looked at content for what we were doing and we broke them down into five acts, or five turns… And we worked out act by act, turn by turn where the audiences emotional state should be at the beginning and where it should be at the end and what change should occur act by act and in good screen writing the changes become bigger the further though the story you go. And if there isn’t a change what is the point of that scene you just wrote every scene should turn on an emotional change and if you were to draw a graph of it it would go up and down like a yoyo and that, it gets bigger as you go along and you need to know what the controlling idea of your story is…by controlling idea I mean premise. What the story is really about. So in king and country what we were trying to achieve is two things. There’s a controlling idea of Britain, is not at it’s best when it stands completely alone, Britain can’t win when it stands completely alone. The other was that you the audience member, you, have the capacity to do far more and to achieve far greater things than you ever imagined and those two things are actually…. With each other and so we plot out a graph, and have two lines, one going this way and the other going this way and one of them is tracking one controlling idea and one is tracking the other…

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The content we throw at an audience takes a couple of forms, one is decisions, we ask them to make big decisions about significant things and we play off the emotional stakes of the decisions. And we do that in the parliamentary format so we have them sitting opposite each other so they’re apart and we’ve told them they’re MPs for somewhere and we’ve told them what party they belong to we, so we separate them along party lines and we let them debate it in a modified sit down parliamentary way. That’s one way we throw content. The other way is through the small games that people break out into, as they interact with those games they also make key decisions, they make decisions…they come back to parliament and they feedback what they’ve done and they get feedback on the relative success or failures…we time them. But the space is there for them to come up with anything that enters their head and our rule is so long as it is in world and so long as it makes sense in world we will build this narrative and we run with it. And that has lead to all kinds of weird and wacky wonderful things happening…

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“Assassinate Hitler Account – see interview”

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But the audience got to do what they wanted to do and we also built some consequences into that as well because Hitler found out about the plan to assassinate Hilter and he ordered the kidnapping of the King which did actually happen and that made for a really interesting end to the show. So being able to pull the narrative in a direction that is interesting for the audience because they’ve offered us ideas but that also fits into our structure and emotional beats, that was the key for us to making something that felt like a satisfying world to tell a story but that also accommodated a huge amount of input from our audience and huge amount of agency and built this narrative on the backstop of things that the audience decided to do, so it’s improve really but it’s improve with your audience. And before we did this we were terrified, if I’m really honest we were absolutely terrified before we did the first run and we only did two weeks initially because I thought, this could really fall on it’s *rse. We had a plan and so we just went for it and what we discovered is that the audience really want to have a good time, they’ve paid £20/£30 whatever quid to come and see your show and actually they really want the show to work. Apart form the odd disgruntled experience maker they really want the show to work and so they are eager to play along and when an audience is rewarded by actual real consequences they get really excited about that. We were talking about the different types of audiences the waders, the divers, the swimmers, we want to make it accessible to all types of people so we give people a reason to be in the show, we don’t expect you to do anything really. We found that in every group we got people who are very respondent, the divers. Once they got engaged and started making decisions the rest of the audience saw that their decisions got real consequences suddenly the swimmers became divers and the waders became swimmers because they could see that not only was the direction of the show being altered by the audience around them but also maybe it wasn’t going the way they wanted it to. All it takes is for one really arrogant git to make one stupid decision and everyone else is up in arms. We’ve had votes of no confidence in the Prime Minister.

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People go to the theatre to feel. Not to think. It’s why musicals are popular.

so in terms of planning, just to give you some useful things to hand on to. People have different words for things… we talk about other sorts of immersive experience and we catagorise them. And we just catagorise them in our own way. I don’t know if this is useful or not really. But It’s useful in as much as understanding how we think about other people’s work. We have four broad categories that when I go and see a show I try and think what are these different things, what are we watching:

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1.The grand narrative – so for me that’s The Drowned man. Got a huge story,                            probably too big to follow the entire story all in one                         go. The great Gatsby that’s around at the moment, similar                         in execution.

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2.The game – shows that are built around game, there’s loads of them and a lot               of you guys make excellent work.

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3.Carousel – and we’ve all seen that. You go in, you see a scene, then you move             on to another scene and then while you’re watching that scene                  there’s  another group come in and see the scene that you’ve just                seen. Then you all move around and you see the same series of scenes           and you come out the other end. A lot of immersive theatre follows                that  model and it’s great for producers, you pack loads of people            into your show but you still keep a relatively small group of people            experiencing it together  at the same time so ideally  you get the best           of both worlds. But I’m bored to death of it. But saying that I’ve                seen  some shows done interestingly through carousel

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4.Sandbox – get a sandbox, fill it full with toys and come up with ways for the          audience to play with the toys. Secret Cinema. Huge scale sandbox                usually, there are smaller versions as well. But it’s about being                immersed in the world and then kind of doing what you want to do within          that world. And there usually being lots of stuff that you can play               with  but there’s a variety of things you can engage with.

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It’s useful to know what you’re dealing with. Some people step into making an immersive experience very instinctively, I know I did, you step in with your instincts what feels right to you and that’s often based on what you’ve seen but it’s useful to just take a step back sometimes and look in from the outside and think what is it actually that I’m trying to make.

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Think of it not like a decision tree but a movie but a movie where the content is variable but what you want the audience to experience and feel remains the same and you allow that in how you develop content that is offered to you by the audience so when we reach a certain point in the show there are things we wouldn’t do but we might have done them twenty minutes earlier. Similarly there are things that we would do at that point in the show that we wouldn’t have done twenty minutes earlier because we’ve got to write the shape of the narrative the audience is experiencing so that it feels satisfying at the end.

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You can have the best plan in the universe but if you execute it poorly it’s like the….

You can plan all day long but if we don’t get the execution right then the plan is for naught. What I’ve found with this kind of dynamically responsive type of work is that you cannot rely on the conventional theatre processes and best practice. It doesn’t apply if I’m honest. The biggest problem we had, was with the stage manager. When we started it we just kind of threw it together and we just made it happened. The team I have is incredible. We threw it together cooperatively and we just made it work. When we were trying to set it up for a much longer run we thought we’d better get a stage manager involved in all of this. And I had to go away to work on a show so I wasn’t going to be there for two weeks. So we got someone in whose a brilliant brilliant stage manager, I can’t talk them up enough but it didn’t work,  it just didn’t work because when I came back to the show what I found was everything had settled down into a very comfortable thing and audiences were doing exactly  the same thing every time and audiences were offering things and those offers were just getting subverted into the same thing that they would do everything…I was like what’s happened here. What happened was that the stage manager had come into this world and the thing about stage management is that if something unexpected happens you are hardwired to correct it. Something unexpected happens it is a problem that needs solving so we solve it with the sledge hammer of stage management. Whereas in this thing that we’re trying to create to give the audience the maximum amount of agency the attitude we needed to take was that if someone does something unexpected that  is an opportunity to be capitalized upon and make the most out of, it’s what makes the show unique at the time. So when I came back we had to have a big shake up of how we did stuff to get back to that rather dangerous place of putting the audience properly in control again because that’s when the magic starts happening again, that’s when the weird things come out that are a lot of fun to play with. The audience come out at the end of the night having achieved our objective for them, having reached the controlling idea for the audience which is that they can be so much more and achieve something better than they thought they could. It’s mind-blowing, it’s liberating for an audience member and I think that is important in the lineage of theatre practice.

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All about trying to get individuals to engage with social and political problems by presenting them with those problems and then giving them the opportunity to step into the world of the show and change things so that those problems are solved or corrected and giving them feedback on how that might play out, challenging their assumptions. What we’re doing is that basically, we’re just not doing it in a forum theatre or modern context, we’re bringing people into a second world war bunker and letting them get on with it. But it achieves potentially the same results. People see problems.

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If you’re going to make this stuff work you have to know your people well. The actors involved in this kind work are very special people. Not because they have any particular raw talent or anything like that but because they’re willing to do it. Because this stuff is scary for normal actors.

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In terms of building a show the characters are the next thing after the plot and emotional beats. The characters and who they are and how they interact with the audience is important because different audience members react differently to all of these different things and having a spread of performers who can draw into these different ways is absolutely critical to make sure you get everyone involved.

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TYPES OF ACTORS:

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     SEDUCTION – Actors who bring you in and with them because you find them                      attractive in some way

     INTIMIDATION – Useful

     INTRIGUE – someone who is trying to get you to be curious about them and                     their actions

      COLLUSION – horrible characters good for this. They’re horrible to some                     people and then lovely to others to make them feel special

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These shows are something that has to be live directed, it’s a creative process… you need somebody with a directing hat who can come in and coordinate the efforts of the actors and can make creative decisions about what happens next and isn’t afraid to do something new and step outside of the box. And I’ve only ever really found a couple of people who can really do that.

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Session 6 – Digital and Storytelling: What’s Next?

                              Ben Mason, The Tome Sawyer Effect

                              Jane Gauntlett, Writer, Director, Producer

                              Oliver Kibblewhite, REWIND

                              Sophia Romualdo, Fire Hazard

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Immersive experiences still work best in the real world. - Oliver Kibblewhite, REWIND