While the theatre industry continues to weather the disastrous effects of COVID19 closures, stages remain dark. Despite this, many theatre companies persevere in the digital space, creating innovative content audiences can enjoy and experience from their living rooms.
Forging ahead without a theatre space or a Fringe festival, we are seeing organisations dedicated to immersive, experiential theatre stepping even further out of the box to create productions audiences can participate in from home. Les Enfants Terribles have created The Prism, a choose-your-own-adventure-style theatrical experience on lucid dreaming, that can be accessed from an email arriving to a subscribing audience member. Another Fringe staple, Darkfield, has swapped its Summerhall-based shipping container for an app and your kitchen table to bring audiences its signature reality-defying, conscious-questioning 360-degree binaural bewilderment in its latest creation of Double, the first presentation to be broadcast from the new Darkfield Radio.
For this 20 minute experience, you will need two people seated opposite each other, ideally two loved ones or two partners at a kitchen table. You will need a glass of water, headphones and The Darkfield Radio App downloaded onto your phone. You will need a ticket. Double, like previous Darkfield container shows Séance, Flight and Coma, is sensorially enveloping and communal, and it explores the Capgras delusion, a horrifying condition in which the victim believes that a loved one has been replaced by an evil twin of sorts, an exact replica with malevolent intentions.
While the audio and dialogue evoke the same disorientation and second-guessing that its predecessors do surrounding doubt and reality, Double isn’t quite as terrifying, perhaps because it may be harder to relate to for some or that the conditions in which you experience it aren’t quite as...dark (excuse the pun) as previous Darkfield experiences. It does force you to question previously held absolute truths and ponder the horrors of losing a loved one, notions that are close to home during these quarantine times. If you are a collector of this theatre company’s production experiences, sad about missing the oddities of the Fringe this 2020 or want to feel connected to theatre again in every way you can, then Double will not be one to skip, especially with the accessible entry price of £5 from 24 July. Continue to experience immersive theatre with this remote digital home encounter from Darkfield.
Age guidance: 14+
Shows Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday from 16th July - 2 August. Preview tickets £3.50, £5 from July 24th.
Experienced through the DARKFIELD RADIO app available for android and iphone.
http://www.darkfield.org/radio