There’s a great deal of immersive theatre knocking about these days: Hotel Medea and Audience at the Fringe, Green and McMaster’s The Fire Burns and Burns, Mr Criticulous’ Critical Confessions. Made fashionable by London’s Punchdrunk, and promoted by any  company that fancies a short-cut to catharsis, it’s been around long enough to be a recognisable tactic but is new enough to retain some shock value.

Although it is hardly original – ever since the Catholic Mass went interactive after Vatican II, even conservative religious traditions are using it – immersive theatre is quite the latest thing. One dance company gained notoriety by clambering naked over their audience (and spitting on a critic), and Adrian Howells took it to a logical end by bathing his audience of one. It might take courage on behalf of both actors and audience but its antecedents are in pantomime and stand-up comedy. And the best theatre has always aimed to immerse the crowd, even if only emotionally.

The contemporary fashion for immersion comes on the back of a reaction against the script and the extremity of the last great British performance movement, New Brutalism. Once Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill had done their nasty business of stage, and the response became jaded, there was nothing left but to shatter the fourth wall to get some kind of emotional engagement.

Immersive theatre can be gentle – Green’s use of nudity and inviting the audience into the action is frequently kind and inclusive, while Fuel have handed a collection of sheds over to artists who promptly made intimate, meditative works. It connects with the love of ritual trumpeted by contemporary performance practice, and often has overtones of spiritual or political conscience – Green again, or even Ontroerend Goed’s more vicious attacks on the traditional role of the crowd. It ticks boxes for the avant-garde, breaking down those pesky conventions of the stage that are supposedly getting in the way of immediacy and engagement. And it probably envies computer games, which really occupy the player’s consciousness.

There’s a parallel with the rash of interactive exhibits popping up in museums and art galleries: and this betrays the anxiety behind the fashion. Both museums and theatre are old, under attack from new media that offer more control and agency to the viewer. Immersive theatre become the one stop solution. Frankly, anything I am using in Critical Confessions is bound to be suspect. I lack any formal theatrical training, but give me a black box, ten minute slots and I’m Larry Olivier.

Green and Goed, and Punchdrunk and Fuel, and Howells and Hotel Medea may not lack the skills, but all this intimacy and immersion is in danger of losing the artistry that makes theatre resonant. I’ve struggled making sense of Green’s latest work – it feels too much like Secular Sunday School for me – and by homing in on a subjective experience, made meaningful not by the vision of the artist but by the engagement of the audience, immersive theatre is in danger of dropping the communal experience that makes theatre different from watching a DVD at home alone.

Of course, anything that brings theatre closer to a lap-dance is fine by me – there’s an immersive experience that achieves exactly the emotional response it aims for – but it also offers problems of interpretation. Reviews of Audience concentrated on the moral conduct of the performers and the possibility that they had plants in the crowd, rather than the message of powerlessness and manipulation that Goed were getting at. Green and McMaster’s The Fire takes on the quality of a sweat lodge, but relies heavily on the individuals finding their own experience and meaning. And, most disturbingly, whenever immersive theatre turns up, it encourages debate about the boundaries of theatre and its form. This is, for me, a major distraction from the real issues that art can discuss.

That might serve as a broader warning against any radicalism in performance style, but that’s another discussion.

Aside from its association with interactive galleries, immersive theatre is very much a product of the Live Art scene, where performers frequently question the participation of the audience. Marina Abramovitch did it that time she let the audience go to town on her body: a regular feature of The National Review was the act which involved a dialogue between performer and audience. There’s even a guy who invites people to slap him about with custard pies while he tries to read rationalist philosophy.  And Pocha Nostra did something in Tramway thatstill scares me.

It’s only when it moves out of this safe zone – Live Art is all about testing the boundaries – that it bothers me. It’s difficult to review a show like the Bystander Effect, which is more social experiment than play. This seems like a problem for the critic, unless it is recognised that the critic is often the connection between an art work and a potential audience. If the entire experience is personal, or based on a twist that needs to be kept secret, or compromises the critic, there is no way of talking about the work in public. At this point, immersion becomes seclusion.

Good immersive theatre also requires skill. I can keep it tight for ten minutes in Critical Confessions, and Green has a kindly demeanour that makes The Fire safe, despite asking something so intimate from the audience. But the cast of Hotel Medea coped very badly when I tried to join in the interaction more realistically: I was disappointed that they failed to handle my attempts to subvert their game, leaving me unimmersed for long sections of the show. By trying to be part of the action in a way not prescribed by the director, I undermined my engagement in the event. And if the actor really wants to immerse the viewer, questions of moral responsibility crop up. I realised pretty quickly that my audience had to leave my booth with a smile. That’s why they get a gift at the end.

Personally, I love being part of the fun. I even went nuts for that mad Santa thing in The Arches over Christmas. I am pretty comfortable being in the game – I can lob my shoes at actors quite happily, so long ad I have permission to play with my conventional role as viewer. I am not concerned that immersion is breaking rules, only that it has to be very good to work. If it is used as a short cut to catharsis, or a trendy excuse for a half-baked idea, or a branch of conceptualism where the artist abdicates responsibility for the audience’s experience: well, I am just bored and unimpressed. And if it reveals a lack of faith in the potential of theatrical convention – the answer might be a few better plays, not a radical restructuring of the foundations of the art  form.

Sodom if they can't take a joke...

My mother would always pretend to be nonplussed by representations of sex and violence, while being secretly offended. My own prudery takes a different form: I pretend to be gung-ho for nudity and brutality, silently insisting on a purpose to any sensational elements in theatre. So, having become bored by burlesque – as it turns out, even sexy young things stripped only engages me if it has a subtle political subtext – I turned my attention to Sodom, a post-student, late night production of Rochester’s play about buggery and moral consequences.

Rochester’s script reads like Shakespeare writing pornography: more cunts than cherubs, and the plot is a flimsy excuse for threats of male rape and women caught with the horses. There’s nothing shocking in obscenity, except when it jars with Rochester’s poetic phrasing. The cast do lend the iambics a received pronunciation, which maintains the initial surprise for a while. Unfortunately, the tricks that they employ to avoid nudity, although clever, strip the play of its serious intention to titillate.

Sadly, they never push beyond the hilarity of saying rude words in posh voices. Certainly, Rochester did not intend for Sodom to have a redeeming moral – the finale is rushed, and the descent to hell an afterthought compounded by a silly joke. Rather, the play is meant to be erotic, sharing the quality of Victorian pornography, using language to thrill. This production refuses to interpret this for a modern audience, leaving it an exercise in dramatic archaeology and never touching on the theatricality of its diverse scenes.

Master of the comic book Alan Moore recently reflected on why violence is so much more acceptable than sex as a topic for art. He promptly added his Lost Girls to the argument, enjoying the irony of throwing a work of pornography into his serious bibliography of mature graphic novels. As with burlesque, Sodom is a reminder of how sexuality is a potent ingredient when flung onto the stage: directed with an eye to the internet era, it could be a challenging hour of amoral entertainment. Yet, unlike Lost Girls, this version refuses to abandon a certain restraint. In answer to Moore’s question, it acknowledges that some things cannot be performed without authenticity: a naked performer is really naked. It’s not fair to expect a fringe show to do justice to Sodom’s sensual potential.

The Fire Burns and Burns (Peter McMaster and Nic Green) @ The Arches

I am surprised at how little I worried about being naked with a group of strangers.

Nic Green's greatest hit was Trilogy - a tentative adventure into feminism in the post-ideological age - and featured large numbers of naked dancing women. Green's enthusiasm for breaking the fourth wall had led to a finale where female audience members were invited to join in a nude rendition of Jerusalem. The Fire teams her with partner Peter McMaster and revisits many of Trilogy's themes: community, inclusion, the personal as the political and, of course, people in the scud.

Taking the format of a mini-sweat lodge, The Fire is a step beyond even immersive theatre.It's a happening, a secular ritual. Fire is a repeated motif, much in the way that the host is used in Mass. It heats the hot stones, it is a metaphor for passion, it lights the candles that represent us as a community.

My own alienation is rarely a surprise to me.

The Fire Burns and Burns is barely concerned with any of the usual conventions of theatre. The quality of the script is irrelevant - although the song that McMaster and Green use to bid us farewell has a charming ambiguity. Their performances are merely explanations of the next step in the ritual. The event itself is merely a recreation of a spiritual initiation process. If I feel nothing - who is at fault?

Although I feel no shame at being naked, or being washed by the performers - I have done this sort of thing with Adrian Howells - I feel little else. No great revelations emerge: I am not challenged, I am not presented with an idea that I have never considered. I smile at other people in the group, but I have not shared anything with them.

Green and McMaster appear to be chasing some fine ideas: the rescue of ritual from the spiritual dustbin, the development of a theatre that allows the audience to find a personal response, a celebration  of the possibility of community. But The Fire fails to ignite my own sense of connection.

My passivity is a matter of concern to me.

Coming Soon: David Hughes and Last Orders

"I feel the company has an openness to the distortions and corruptions of dance to creative ends."
Alex Rigg, performer and poster boy for Last Orders


When David Hughes Dance hit the Traverse with The Red Room at Fringe 2009, the enthusiasm of the critics was contagious. Not only did he recruit the dark lord of clowning, Al Seed, he presented a version of The Masque of the Red Death that incorporated Indian dance, a disorientating light scheme and even a joke about ballet at the French court. Perhaps taking his cue from continental companies like Les Ballet C de la B, Hughes recruited a diverse cast, and placed their technical skill and traditions at the service of Seed's fiendish vision.

Come 2011, and expectations were running high for the "sequel": Al Seed taking on the legend of Sawney Bean, Scotland's most famous cannibal. Yet the result divided critics. Some delighted in the savagery of Seed's vision; others attacked it as predictable and distasteful. It was even accused of bulletin boards of "not being theatre" - an accolade usually afforded to the most challenging work that settles down in subsequent years to become an establishment favourite, like The Rite of Spring.

Hughes' career has included time in Ballet Rambert - when, under choreographer Christopher Bruce, they were are their creative peak - and DV8, who were crucial during the introduction of physical theatre to wider audiences. His subsequent work has included solo pieces from some of the UK's finest choreographers - especially the challenging Bruce's Hurricane, set to the music of Bob Dylan and retelling the story of the unjustly imprisoned boxer in a powerfully mimetic style.

Yet unlike many other companies - including Rambert, who have remained stuck in ballet-based technique - David Hughes Dance have followed up on the promise of  freedom within "contemporary" choreography. While much so-called contemporary dance is ballet with a few ungainly additions, DHD reached out to other forms. The Red Room was an expression of confident mutation: Last Orders has taken that confidence further. Refusing to tame Bean's story for the stage, it has been accused of reveling in ugliness.

Of course, that is entirely appropriate for the story that Last Orders tells.That the show has met such harsh criticism does not reflect so much on the quality - no-one suggests that the company can't hack it - but the challenges made to the accepted ideas of what dance ought to cover. It's also a question of taste...

Eno gets Brewed

Shock Upset at City Halls as Local Boys Take Down Magisterial Soundscape artist


Music at the Brew House 4: Icebreaker 3

Brian Eno, long established as the defining artists for both ambient and electronic music, has lost out to Edinburgh's contemporary classical underdogs Stephen Deazley and Martin Parker. This long-awaited clash, pairing Edinburgh's Music at the Brewhouse against Icebreaker's recreation of Eno's Apollo, ended in upset as Deazley's collaboration with media designer  Andy McGregor emphasised an idiosyncratic story of one man's bravery over The Science Museum's 2009 commission featuring Eno's music and NASA's footage of the moon landing.

On paper, it was no contest. Eno's 1983 album Apollo, Atmospheres and Soundtracks had been scored for Icebreaker, known for their driving soundtrack to Ashley Page's seminal ballet, Cheating, Lying, Stealing. The addition of BJ Cole upfront on pedal steel, and the unseen images from Apollo's mission to the moon, seemed to ensure that Brewhouse, more frequently seen at Tramway creating multi-media musical happenings and relying only on a film of the barely known test pilot Joseph Kittinger, would provide little more than a distraction.

Brewhouse chose to bat first, offering a taut introduction. Guided by Kittinger's journey into the outer reaches of the stratosphere, and his descent, Man High made optimum use of the chamber line up: Peter Furness' clarinets summoning up the woozy splendour of the ascent, while the three violins held steady, lending a romantic swoon to the adventure. Driven by Joby Burgess' diverse percussion and David Knotts' pulsating keyboards, Brewhouse illustrated McGregor's mixing of the 1960 footage of the pilot's 32  kilometer leap.

In the second half, Icebreaker began with a solid summary of the space race's intentions. Footage of Kennedy giving it patriotic pride and the tension at Cape Canaveral soon resolved into iconic imagery of the Apollo spacecraft reaching to the moon. Because of the emphasis on new footage - no countdown to blast-off or amusing zero gravity snacking - the familiarity of the journey does not detract from the spectacular surrealism of the moon landing. By the time the astronauts finally reach the moon, Icebreaker have established both the bravery of the mission and the splendour of our species' trans-planetary ambition.

For all Brewhouse's dynamic drama, the relaxed majesty of Eno and Icebreaker looked set to triumph. Then, sometime between the landing and the larking about on the moon, Icebreaker lost the game. Cole's pedal steel adds an awkward sentimentality to the sequences after the US flag has been planted. The new footage is given the intensity of holiday film, a schmaltzy, thoughtless celebration of a couple of guys arsing about in outer space. Eno is not just an avant-garde electronic experimentalist: he is the producer of U2, and this is audible in the later half of For All Mankind. Ironically, the astronauts are brought back to earth by his sterile theft of Hawaiian and country motifs.

Of course, the real winner tonight was contemporary classical music: Deazley and Parker established themselves as accessible, forceful composers, and even Icebreaker's disappointing result linked ambient electronica to lush orchestration. A show of two halves, perhaps... but both halves demonstrated how music can reanimate obscure heroes of history and events that familiarity has rendered empty.