Leaning in the dark, I touch the tip of my shoe against an empty bottle on the floor and calculate the series of events that would be set into motion if I rolled the glass under the feet of Banquo’s ghost.
I would never do it – I’d be an idiot if I did – but I’m still stood there with the bottle and eyeing up his legs...
Down the dark vaults of Clerkenwell House of Detention, Belt Up Theatre are putting on Macbeth, the cells of this 19th-century prison transformed into the mind of Shakespeare’s Scottish king.
Belt Up specialise in immersive, site-specific performance; immersive being a large umbrella-of-a-term that encompasses everything from one-on-one interaction to large-scale promenade theatre. This type of performance promises its audience something different from a traditional stage-play; the chance for direct bodily involvement in the action of the piece.
But being lowered into the bathwater is one thing; feeling like you’re able to splash around is another. Immersive theatre, more so than a platform for sensory play, has the potential to explore something else: the audience’s desire for involvement and a frustration of that desire.
As its popularity has risen, audiences have grown accustomed to the styles of immersive performance and purchase their ticket with certain sensory expectations. In her blog, playwright Sarah Grochola compares last year’s You Me Bum Bum Train, in which each audience member is made the protagonist in a range of disjointed scenes, to the act of shoe shopping.
This year’s One-on-One festival at the BAC catered for the personal tastes of its audience by setting up the event as a series of “menus”, with performances based on flavours such as “reflective” or “dreamy”. We consume this style of performance with eager bellies, but who serves us our dinner?
For a character, the opportunity to escape the traditional stage is a potential movement towards independence: autonomy. Now don’t get me wrong, the world is over-populated enough without an infinity of fictional stomachs to fill and I’m not saying we should give them the vote, but breaking from the walls of a traditional stage could, to some degree, present a chance for self-authorship.
And yet what tends to happen is the very opposite. Characters are often reduced to tableaux; figures that blend into the architecture of the site and serve only to compliment the aesthetic atmosphere of the piece. It would seem that, crushed under the boots of the newly empowered audience, characters run the risk of being reduced to facilitators for sensory experience.
The real power of immersive theatre is the conflict that crops up when there is a clash between audience and character; both parties detached from the traditional rule-book, both hungry for action, yet both unsure where the power lies.
The real question is how should emerging companies work with this uncertainty? It would be unfair to describe Belt Up’s Macbeth as tableaux, but at the same time, the unwillingness to sever the audience from Shakespeare’s text seems to be a missed opportunity.
Should audiences disrupt these narratives, and what happens when characters fight back? Maybe if I roll that bottle just slightly forward…
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