There’s a deep underlying thrum of rhythmic bass, heavily muffled but with traces of repetitive tune. Trickling water, then a loud rush of it. The metallic click followed by a creaking hinge and a slam. Someone sniffles loudly. More water, another creak and the music bursts through unmuffled for a few seconds, then another slam and everything as it was before.
A couple of weeks back I went to a Darkfield masterclass in Shoreditch Town Hall — for quasi-work and semi-play reasons — and I greatly enjoyed it. I’ve long been a fan of Glen Neath and David Rosenberg’s binaural work, part of a loose constellation of immersive theatre also encompassing Shunt and Punchdrunk, which seems to have been a major cultural thread for me over the last couple of decades. (A pox on the lottery for You Me Bum Bum Train, btw.) Darkfield shows are delicate bite sized miniatures beside behemoths like The Drowned Man, but none the worse for that.
Their latest opus, Arcade, is the centrepiece of the same Shoreditch season as that masterclass, and I caught up with it last week. It’s a fun CYOA branching narrative kind of deal, the most complex and technologically demanding of their shows, with some really cool environmental effects. But it’s also just a bit… random? For all the immediacy of the physical experience, there’s something abstracted about it, like you are watching remotely rather than experiencing it yourself. Even though you have (a little) agency, your choices don’t feel meaningful, the consequences — cryptic conversations, physical tokens, abrupt violence — somehow inconsequential. Darkfield shows usually take pains to centre the listener, but this one doesn’t — or at least didn’t for me. I’d definitely recommend it as an entertaining ghost train ride, but it’s not quite up there with their best. (That’s Coma, in case you’re wondering.)
It did, peripherally, make me want to have another play with ink, though, so who knows? Watch this space.