It’s not easy to describe or review immersive theatre pieces, such as this one currently being offered by StampCollective at the Theatre Delicatessen, Marylebone. Comparisons to previous works, such as Punchdrunk’s Masque of the Red Death, or more recently The Good Neighbour (both at Battersea Arts Centre – the home and hub, it seems, of immersive theatre), or the work by the fledgling Banner Theatre, based in Birmingham, are of little use, as one of the key points of immersive theatre is that it is just so, so different.

Moralgorithm is the deliberately ambiguous and clinical name of a dreary and Orwellian product-testing company. The 1984-esque setting is finely attuned, all the way down to the grey tiled carpeting and strip-lights. The audience, or new employees, are then split into teams and barked at by the general manager (Gaia Harvey-Jackson) into visiting different workstations. But change is afoot and the smell of revolt is in the air. Moralgorithm is experiencing its very own Arab Spring, or rather ‘Battenberg Rebellion’ (all will be explained once you’re there). We workers group together, aided by the more established members of staff, to overthrow the management and escape. And it’s exhausting stuff.

The level of detail that has gone into making this is very impressive indeed. With immersive theatre, you can only plan so far, and much has to be left to chance, or the whim of a particularly anarchic audience member. I was selected to assist with the uprising, and was tasked to find whistles to help equip my workers come the revolution. (Incidentally, I’d like to think I fulfilled this role with aplomb, bearing in mind I was asked if I was ‘a plant’ by another audience member at the end of the piece.) The whistles were scattered around the space, as were plenty of red herrings –  a set of keys, or some scribbled down notes – the depth of thought that has gone into this is quite remarkable.

Equally remarkable is the level of information about participants that is stored and fed into the marketing of future products; no throw-away quip is safe, everything said can, and quite possibly will, be used against you. As I said, quite Orwellian indeed.

After all was said and done, I caught up with and questioned StampCollective’s Ellie, who had ably played Moralgorithm’s supervisor and revolt instigator. She described her work as creating “real life imaginary playgrounds”. With revolt as a theme, was there a political undercurrent to the piece? “Yes”, she replied, “but what art doesn’t?”, before going on to stress that StampCollective’s work was political, but also, well, a little bit silly (hence the emphasis on Battenberg cake). I was interested to discover that Moralgorithm was just one piece of a jigsaw of a wholly created world, and that Stampcollective have performed interlinking works at the Bush Theatre, Southbank Centre and the Hackney Downs Studios. The potential therefore to get to know, and actively engage with, characters over a variety of spaces and settings is, I believe, a very exciting development for the future of theatre, and one that A Younger Theatre should keep an eye on.

Moralgorithm is the last performance at Theatre Delicatessen in Marylebone before it is turned into a block of flats. What further reason do you need therefore to catch something so different?

StampCollective’s Moralgorithm is running at Theatre Delicatessen until 23 March. For more information and tickets, see the Theatre Delicatessen website.

Meow Meow has always had us at AYT entertained, which is why we’re excited to be able to offer £10 tickets to her latest show at Southbank Centre. Get a booking!

MEOW MEOW’S LITTLE MATCH GIRL
13 – 30 December

Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall

Following her starring role in Kneehigh’s West End hit The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the international cabaret sensation returns to London with a sizzling show guaranteed to defrost the coldest of hearts. Meow Meow invites you to her deliciously dark twist on this classic winter tale.

Book tickets / Watch Trailer 

Best available tickets for only £10! (usually up to £30)

For performances:

Saturday 15 December, 6.30pm
Saturday 15 December, 9pm
Sunday 16 December, 2pm
Sunday 16 December, 6.30pm
Saturday 22 December  6.30pm
Saturday 22 December  9pm
Sunday 23 December     2pm
Sunday 23 December     6.30pm
Saturday 29 December  9pm
Sunday 30 December     2pm

Quote THEATRE online or call 0844 847 9910.
Book online here.

Tickets are subject to availability.

Writer and actor Sophie Woolley writes about creating Bee Detective, a totally accessible play for both deaf and hearing children.

When I decided to write an entertaining kids play about disappearing honeybees, I didn’t expect to end up endangered myself. A week before our opening weekend however, I had a traffic accident on the way to rehearsal and broke my shoulder. Fortunately it was my left shoulder that broke, so I could still write. Unfortunately, I was also star of the show.

Bee Detective features fighting, dancing – and sign language. To make the play accessible to both deaf children and hearing children, the actors speak and sign all the dialogue. You need two working arms to be able to sign on stage, so I passed my detective badge, wings and beehive wig to director Gemma Fairlie who deputised until we could recast.

Fortunately we already had British Sign Language (BSL) Monitor, Daryl Jackson, on board to help polish Gemma’s sign language. BSL monitors are so important when acting in sign language. As well as ensuring clear sign “diction”, accuracy and visibility (comparable to projecting your voice), a monitor can also imbue your translation from English into BSL with depth, richness and nuance.

As newcomers to integrated signed theatre, Gemma and I often felt daunted. Acting in two languages simultaneously meant we sometimes felt like we were patting our heads and stroking our tummies at the same time. The signed grammar sometimes ran counter to the English grammar. We used a combination of sign-supported English, BSL, stage sign, and character physicality and gesture. We invented specific bee-like signs such as “aware”, where we adapted the usual sign to become swivelling beady big eyes on the top of the head.

Flexibility was key. If an actor struggled to make a certain line work in both English and sign, I flipped the order of sentences. We picked and chose the best of both worlds. It led to lovely moments such as the drone bee describing how his worker sister bees look after bee babies. He says the lines and then the BSL flies on, with his hands as the nanny bees desperately trying to keep the teeming bee babies under control in the honeycomb as they fly off in all directions.

Bee Detective is funded by Unlimited, as part of the Cultural Olympiad: a commission to stretch the practice of deaf and disabled artists (I’m deaf myself). As well as it being my first children’s show, we wanted to raise the bar on accessibility. Our usual, ground breaking projected subtitles are bigger, bolder, with stunning animation by James Merry. We have a vibrating hexagon floor for children and parents to sit on to mimic the experience of being a buzzy bee in a hive.

Although doctors barred me from acting on tour, I’ve been able to watch one of my own shows for the first time. Gemma is back in full director mode and our new detective, Elinor Keber, is set to wow deaf and hearing children at what promises to be a game changing disability arts festival at the Southbank Centre.

For more information about Bee Detective follow the company’s blog and for tickets, see the Southbank website. If you’re interested in finding out more about accessible theatre, you can attend a panel with Sophie and others at Unlimited Festival on 30 August – more information here.

Image credit: Elyse Marks

It is hard to verbally express the inadequacy of language. Sometimes words just seem to burst at the seams, their intrinsic limitations ready to break due to the multiplicity of meaning they hold and the frustration of the cliches that we’ve forced them to bear. But writer Don DeLillo has never been one to shy away from meaning, and in this one-act play the insightful novelist playfully uses the act of writing to test the limits of his own lexical tools.

Owing far more to Ferdinand de Saussure than to Samuel Johnson, The Word for Snow drips with heavy linguistic theory. The interaction between item and label is tested as “every word becomes the thing”. Fittingly, while thrilling in its absurdism, the text is not the strongest element of this piece. Initially, the words expressed bring nothing new to debates surrounding language, but through their “structured improvisation” and inventive devising, theatre company Future Ruins forces us to picture a world where it’s not language that is deemed unfit for the items it represents, but rather where the environment is crumbling away from the net of words we use to cover it, and only the conceptual remains.

In this particular production, there is a latecomer in the auditorium. Bearing a backpack, this traveller has clearly come far, but he looks around with a bright and nervous enthusiasm. As he heads up the rows, the house lights go up and it becomes clear that this explorer – our Pilgrim – is on the hunt for meaning. Planted in the audience, he represents the collective’s unspoken search for truth and his attention hones in on two men who take their position of authority on the stage.

The first of these two figures is an exiled scholar (Jasper Britton), who dwells on a mountain-top in North West Asia. His companion is the Interpreter, a stone-faced character played with a fierce solemnity by Thomas Grube. At this early stage, Britton is largely silent, yet with lips sealed and the assistance of his interpreter, he is in a position to answer questions about communication.

In translating the Scholar’s silence into meaning, there is a certain rhythm to Grube’s sentences. These statements are delivered with authority. Many of the Interpreter’s utterances begin with a loaded “He”, which rings with an almost religious feeling. A theological search for answers becomes apparent and the three men start to generate their own tripartite where our vocabulary is cast as an imperfect god. Here, the exiled scholar represents meaning, the interpreter represents language’s attempts to articulate this meaning, and the pilgrim represents humanity’s doubt at this process, even in the presence of worthy attempts.

While Don DeLillo’s battle with language is played out with flawed words, Future Ruin’s incorporation of multimedia becomes increasingly charged. Teppei Nogaki’s film and projection function independently of the actions and words of the characters. His scenes of large-scale catastrophe and global warming represent the significance of elements that language only works to mask. Evocations of nature’s threatening power bring us back to a time before language, reminding us that our letters and words are ultimately inadequate attempts to harness a world that exists outside of our control.

The Word for Snow ran at the Southbank’s Centre Purcell Room as part of the London Literature Festival from 10-12 July.