A lot of times, when I describe what we’ve done, to people who make this sort of work, they say: “But that’s not possible! You can’t! Surely you don’t really do that!” And they don’t really believe me unless they come and participate in one of the shows and then they’ll say: “Oh yeah, you have done that.”
The impossible has been Owen Kingston’s stock in trade for some years now. From protecting an alternative Britain from a Nazi invasion, to nudging 1970s Labour back from the brink of defeat to Margaret Thatcher, Kingston and his collaborators at Parabolic Theatre have always specialised in giving audiences high-stakes situations to grapple with, and making their actions have a genuine impact on the outcome of their experience.
Now, Kingston and his long-standing creative associates take their brand of highly interactive theatre into the stars, as their new show, Bridge Command gives London audiences the chance to experience what it would be like to fly their own spaceship, four years after the pandemic brought its original iteration to a premature end.
To celebrate, we are welcoming him back into the voidspace to give us insight into this unique brand of interactive theatre, the development of Bridge Command from shoestring experiment to touch-real spacecraft, and how the new show combines cutting edge technology with good old-fashioned storytelling to give participants a uniquely personal experience.
Image: Alex Brenner
voidspace:
Welcome back to the voidspace, Owen. It’s so good to see you again.
Owen Kingston:
It’s good to be back.
voidspace:
I think you were one of the first conversations that we published, a long time ago, now, and you’ve got some exciting new stuff that you’ve been working on that was worth another conversation all in itself. To start off, give us a brief overview, for new readers of who you are and the kind of work that you make.
Owen Kingston:
I’m Owen Kingston. I’m the artistic director of Parabolic Theatre. We specialise in making highly interactive, immersive theatre.
voidspace:
One thing that’s become really apparent from these conversations is that interactivity is a very broad church. It can be anything from choosing what you look at and where you go to the other end of the scale, changing the whole outcome of a show. Where do you sit on that scale?
Owen Kingston:
I think we sit on the more highly interactive end of the scale. The sort of work we make was born out of a frustration with doing things that had labelled themselves interactive, but really only offered a fig leaf of interactivity and that were basically going to be on rails, no matter what. If you were invited to interact in these sorts of shows, what you did didn’t really have any meaningful impact on what was going on. It might be fun to do that still – that can still be fun and good experience – but it’s frustrating when it’s implied that what you are going to do will have a big impact on the show, but actually it isn’t having an impact at all, behind the scenes.
What we wanted to do was create shows where the audience could participate, and that participation would be meaningful, and where the edges of the world of the show would be eliminated. At no point were you going to get told: “Sorry, you can’t do that. That’s not part of this show.”, because for me, that breaks the immersion. It’s hard to allow yourself to believe in this fantasy world if you’re constantly being told “That’s not part of this world. You can’t do that here, and the reason is just because we haven’t planned for that”. If I’m allowing myself to become immersed, if I’m allowing myself to inhabit the world of the show alongside the performers, then I don’t want things jolting me out of that all the time. I want to feel like I can do what seems logical to me, and that that will have logical consequences.
So, we try and build shows that allow for those things. And that’s hard. A lot of times, when I describe what we’ve done to people who make this sort of work, they say: “But that’s not possible! You can’t! Surely you don’t really do that!” And they don’t really believe me unless they come and participate in one of the shows and then they’ll say: “Oh yeah, you have done that.” It’s not perfect, but that’s what we strive for, to push those boundaries.
voidspace:
So you strive to make sure that the choices that the audience make during the show, suggestions that they make, or the plans that they make, are actually reflected in the show itself. It’s not just a matter of having skilful performers who can pander to you. You will actually see the results of what you’ve done when you pull that lever.
Owen Kingston:
Yeah. You inhabit the world of the show alongside the performers, and you have pretty much as much agency to affect that world of that show as the people who’ve created it. That’s the idea. If something seems logical to you and you want to try and make it happen, then, assuming it fits within the world of show, and assuming it is possible, we make every effort to try and make that happen. We then feedback the consequences of that to you, so that you know you have made an impact. Because it’s all very well making impact, but if you never realise that you did, you might as well have not done.
voidspace:
That makes sense. It’s about mechanics and it’s about feedback as well.
Owen Kingston:
Yeah. And about allowing yourself to believe in that alternate reality for a little while, and not having things that are constantly jolting you out of it. We do have good game mechanics under the hood, but it’s not just about the game mechanics. I’ve also experienced lots of shows which were about the game mechanics, and the story is like a nice add on to it, rather than the central focus. And I very much believe that the story is the important bit. That’s the dog. The game mechanics are the tail being wagged by the dog, not the other way around.
voidspace:
So, everything you’re doing is in the service of really making your audience feel part of the story.
Owen Kingston:
That’s the idea. Making them feel like they’re a central part of the story, not just an adjunct to it. You can be told that you’re a hero, but that’s different from actually getting to be the hero. And so what we try and do is give people the opportunity to be the best versions of themselves, to step up. Maybe in the past they had thought “I wonder how I would be in that situation? I wonder how I would be in a big emergency? I wonder how I would behave if my country was getting invaded?” We create the scenario, give you the opportunity to test that in a safe, and hopefully fun, environment.
voidspace:
Some people have compared your work to LARPing (live action roleplaying). What sets you apart from that sort of experience?
Owen Kingston:
We choose to take more responsibility for the outcome of the story than would happen in LARP, where players generate the story between them, because I think we see it as more of a transactional thing. Like any theatre experience, you’ve paid us to deliver story to you. We’re doing it in an unusual way. We’re not standing on a stage at the end of a big room, and you’re not sitting in a seat watching us. We’re doing it all in the same space. But there is still something of that theatrical transaction taking place, where you’ve paid us to deliver to you a story well-told. We give you agency to participate in that, but we still feel a sense of responsibility, ultimately, for delivering the story-telling.
The distinction between our brand of immersive theatre and LARPing is that we never expect players to be anything other than themselves, in a different context. So, Katy, you come to Bridge Command, you’re still Katy, you’re just Katy in space in 2180. The question is, what would you be like in that context? We don’t expect you to become “Brunhilda the space legend, pirate queen” or whatever. Not that it’s necessarily wrong to do that. We have had players who’ve come along with a real strong sense of playing a different character and that’s fine. But we don’t expect you to do it and we don’t require you to do it. That’s the key distinction. You can just be you in a different context, and that’s the baseline level of expectation from us.
voidspace:
Once you have that as your base expectation, you actually get people delving in with a lot more authenticity in terms of how they engage with the dilemmas that you raise as part of your shows.
Owen Kingston:
Yeah, I think that’s fair. And it often does feel honest and truthful. Not that LARPing can’t be honest and truthful. In fact, the best LARPing is, I think. But by taking that pressure off the player, it allows more people to access it, because it’s less of an investment of time and less of an investment of stress and anxiety.
voidspace:
Emotional energy.
Owen Kingston:
Emotional energy, yeah, for true. And it means that you can involve yourself more casually. You can decide on a spur of moment that you want to go and do this tonight, and book it and then go and do it and not worry about planning anything in advance. We provide you with everything you need, and then you can be you in that different context.
voidspace:
It’s interesting that you say that you will take responsibility for the storytelling in a show. It’s easy to forget that, because you’ve made the sense that we, as participants have such an important part to play, that it feels like a genuine responsibility on our shoulders.
I’ve got to say, I’ve always thought that, you know that one of your shows is on its way when you read the scenario and actually feel slightly terrified by it.
Owen Kingston:
I think we are at the extreme end of interactivity, and that we major in really intense scenarios, things that really stretch people, that provide a real challenge and story-wise, provide a high impact, high stakes environment. That is a huge part of what we do. There’s some great interactive and immersive work out there that’s very low stakes, and it’s very possible to make that kind of work. We just don’t make it.
voidspace:
Previous shows of yours have provided those stakes by making work set at times of national emergency. For King and Country is set in an alternate history timeline, where the Nazis have invaded England. You’ve got Crisis? What Crisis? which is set at a crisis point of the 1970s Labour government. And you really do feel, playing that show, that the future of the country, in some cases, the actual world is at stake. We’ve talked about all of these shows in a lot of detail in our previous interview, which readers can take a look at here.
But today we’re here to talk about Bridge Command, which is something very different. I would love to hear a bit about what Bridge Command is, and particularly given what you’ve just said, how you give that sense of stakes and that sense of importance to the world that you’re creating.
Owen Kingston:
It might be helpful tell you where it came from, because that’s what it is. I think it was over a decade ago now, that myself and a very good friend from school, who I’d kept up with in adult life, and who is also a theatre director, were talking about science fiction and Star Trek and Star Wars, and all those kind of films and shows, and how there isn’t a lot of science fiction theatre. There’s some, but there’s not a lot of it. We’ve been thinking experientially and immersively, since before Parabolic was a company. Could you make an interactive, make an experiential show that involved science fiction in some way?
As part of that conversation, we started looking at what tech was out there. And we came across bridge simulation software for the first time. We came across Artemis, which is, I think, the first piece of bridge simulation software. You can get it on the web, and it’s made by an indie developer, on his own. We played Artemis, just him and me in my front room. I’m the sort of person who’s got a tonne of computers in my house, old ones, mostly, so we set up some computers, and between the two of us, we set up a little bridge and played this bridge simulator.
The thing that struck us about it was that it was a lovely computer game piece of software, and importantly it outputted commands to DMX, which used to be the theatre standard for show control for everything. Lighting, sound, special effects, the whole lot. It’s changed slightly now, there’s something called OSC nowadays, but for years and years and years, DMX was the way of digitally controlling everything in a theatre. All the lights would plug into a lighting desk, which would use the DMX protocol to tell them when to turn on and off and how bright, and all of that. Similarly, it would tell smoke machines when to turn on and off, so if you programmed a whole bunch of cues, they’d fire off. What Artemis did was, when things happened in the game, it generated DMX commands that you could then send to different pieces of theatre hardware, like lights and smoke machines and all of that stuff.
And so, being theatre people with a slightly techie background as well, we looked at that and we thought, “That’s brilliant!” We could build a set and put lights and smoke machines and spark generators and basically anything that you can plug into DMX, and the game could dynamically control those things. How cool would that be? Has anybody done this? And we looked online and a few kind of very techy people from the computer world, not with any kind of theatre background, had built themselves little bridges in their houses, and they mainly used the remotely controllable lights that you can screw into your ceiling. But nobody had used Artemis to control proper theatre tech. Noone that we could find on the internet, anyway.
We thought: there’s an opportunity here. If we had the time and the money and the inclination, we could build ourselves a starship set, build all of this tech into it, and then it would be pretty close to being in Star Trek or Star Wars or shows like that. We got very excited about it and then we realised we didn’t have any money and we didn’t have any time, because we both had other things we were working on, so we parked it. One day, we thought, we’ll have time when we can have a look at it properly and get some money from somewhere and make it happen.
Years went by after that initial conversation, and in that time, my friend stopped working in theatre, and I started Parabolic. The idea of trying to realise this thing always felt out of reach because of the cost. Because to build a set like that and make it really feel good, it’s going to cost a decent amount of money. And the problem with trying to raise money for something that nobody’s really done before is convincing people that it’s going to work. When you’re trying to get people to help you, it’s really helpful if you can say “It’s going to be just like that thing over there”. This is particularly helpful if you’re trying to raise money, because pointing at an example, that’s been successful and made money, is necessary for a lot of investors to part with cash. Nobody wants to be the first to try something, because it feels too risky.
So I was at this point, sitting on this idea, thinking, I’d love to make it happen, but we don’t have the money to do it. Then we made For King and Country, which was a very unexpected, roaring success for Parabolic. It was one of our very early shows, and it put us on the map. Thousands of people came to see it and we made quite a lot of money off doing it. We’d run that show, I think, three times, and each time it had made money and done well, and it was getting to summertime in 2019. We’d just finished a run of For King and Country, and then we’d gone straight into making Crisis? What Crisis?
I was absolutely knackered. I’d done two big shows back-to-back in the first half of the year, and all I really wanted to do was go on holiday, but sometimes the universe just won’t let you do something like that. There’s something there you’re supposed to do, and it keeps knocking on your door until you do it, and that’s how Bridge Command happened in 2019. I was looking at trying to go on holiday, and then I heard from Bertie, who ran the immersive theatre venue COLAB Factory, that there was some space available for us.
COLAB had had a show that had supposed to be going into the basement. It had done three or four weeks and completely failed. The people had left early, and the basement was empty over the summer. And Bertie said to me, do you want to just come and do some R&D in the basement? If you come up with a show, you can run the show down there. We’d done several successful shows in the COLAB basement, and I think he was hoping we’d just come up with something brilliant, and then that would be his programming sorted for another six months. Quite flattering of him to ask, really. And it felt like a too good an opportunity to pass up on.
voidspace:
You take space whenever you can get it, don’t you?
Owen Kingston:
Especially if it’s free. I was looking online at Set Exchange, which I used to do periodically, because we were always looking for free things that we could use. Set Exchange is a great freecycle website for theatre companies. People give away old bits of set that they don’t want anymore. It’s a great way to pick up unusual items that you can’t find anywhere else, and might be very expensive to buy. When I looked this time, someone was giving away a whole bunch of computers, monitors and all sorts of other bits of techie kit. Usually, with that kind of stuff, that could be resold it’s gone in seconds, if it goes on Set Exchange. But I emailed them straight away anyway, and they came back to me and said it was available, which never happens, with that kind of thing, on Set Exchange.
So, I met this guy, and got an old big screen TV, and a whole bunch of computers, and all sorts of other things off him. And I looked at it, I thought, there’s enough computers here to make a bridge with a main view screen. And slowly it started dawning on me, this is the time to have a go at making a version of a bridge simulation show. It’s the universe telling you to do something. So, I cancelled any plans of going on holiday.
voidspace:
The universe’s way of telling you you’re not allowed a holiday.
Owen Kingston:
Yeah. I decided I was going to spend the summer trying to put together what later became Bridge Command. I called up the various people who’d been working on Parabolic shows with me for a few years, at that point, and said, “Look, this is what I want to try next. Are you up for just giving it a little bit of time over the summer? I’ve not got any money to pay you, but if we can make a show, then hopefully it’ll keep us in beer and fags for another few months”. And they pretty much all said that they’d love to give it a go. And so, for a few weeks in August, we all met together.
Originally, we were just going to set up the computers in the space and test the game software, with a little bit of character action. But then, we thought, it would be nice if there were at least some walls to make it feel a bit more like a set. We had some flats down there, so we thought we’d put up a few walls. Then we put up the walls and we thought we should probably paint the walls, because it looked a little bit stark. And then we thought: “Well, doesn’t feel very spaceshipy. Maybe if we added a few more details…”. Before you knew it, we got carried away and we built ourselves a little spaceship in the basement.
It was not beautiful. It made 1970s Doctor who sets look very polished and professional, because it was very wobbly. Some of the walls literally wobbled if you leant on them. It was made out of off-cut bits of wood and, in some cases, cardboard. It was very roughly strapped together, and we didn’t spend any money on it. It was all recycled stuff, what we had lying around down there from other shows. The only thing we actually spent money on is getting touch screen monitors, because we really felt like the future should be touchscreen.
voidspace:
You can’t really have an ancient click-clack keyboard, can you?
Owen Kingston:
No. We started developing this using Artemis, but we very quickly realised that Artemis had a whole bunch of limitations that made it feel very computer-gamey. Then we discovered another piece of software, which fixed loads of the problems we’d been having with Artemis, and had huge amounts of potential for future development. So, with a couple of weeks to go, we switched everything we were doing from being on Artemis to being on this new piece of software. We started using an open source piece of software, called Empty Epsilon. It was developed and published by someone called Daid and we were able to adapt it to meet our needs.
We spent this intensive little bit of time learning how to run games, how to build a game world that you could put the player ship in, how to hook everything up with DMX, so that when stuff happened to the ship in game, real effects happened in the real world. It was quite basic, because we couldn’t afford a lot of tech, but we had a smoke machine, which was great. Whenever the warp engine overheated, smoke would billow everywhere and flood the whole interior of the ship. We also had lots of lighting in different places. If you pressed the red alert button, all the lights changed red, and a siren went off. We had enough to test the technical side of it, to make sure it worked, and we got to the point where we were happy with it.
We put some tickets on sale and we thought, we’ll do this for a week and see how it goes. We put tickets on sale for a week’s worth of shows. And it was the fastest selling show Parabolic have ever had. Within, I think it was 7 hours, all the tickets for that week had gone. I sat up and took notice at that point.
I hadn’t realised it would be that much in demand. I’d thought it was a bit pulp, being science fiction. I think a lot of people can be quite snobbish about science fiction, particularly in the highbrow world of theatre. I’d been bit worried that people wouldn’t book for it, because we’d tried to be a bit more highbrow with some of Parabolic’s other offerings. But this thing just sold. So we put a second week on sale, and the second week didn’t sell out completely, but it sold very well. And it made me think there really was something here.
Like a lot of Parabolic shows, we didn’t know how it was going to work until it meets the audience for the first time. Nothing is guaranteed. I remember when we did For King and Country the first time, I was terrified because we were giving the audience a genuinely unprecedented level of agency. I don’t think any show before that had ever really tried. We were doing it in a way that allowed them to essentially rewrite the show on the fly, and I genuinely didn’t know whether it was going to work or whether it was going to completely fall in its arse and make us all look very stupid. I was relieved when it did work, but Bridge Command had a similar kind of flavour about it. I didn’t know if it was going to work, or if people were just not going to engage with it.
We’d done a very limited test before the show went on public sale. We’d allowed people to just play with the tech and we’d observed how quickly they could pick up how to do it. What we learned from that was that when you had somebody sitting in the Captain’s chair who was really on it, who people would listen to and who was not afraid to throw out the orders, it worked brilliantly. When you had someone in the captain’s chair who was too timid or a bit too cool for school, it didn’t work as well. So, in that very first show that we made, we made sure that an actor was on the ship with the crew in the role of captain. Then we’d find a reason why the actor has to leave so that the audience can take over completely. But it enables that transition into the show to be smooth every time, as opposed to it being hit and miss, depending on who your audience is.
voidspace:
Onboarding is so important, isn’t it, in terms of how you immerse people. Expecting people to jump in at the deep end isn’t always going to work.
Owen Kingston:
Most people are able to lead, provided they’ve got a model that they’re following. And so, what we were trying to do was provide a model for what it is to be a captain on the bridge of a ship that they could then mimic.
voidspace:
Well, it’s basically a way of giving them the rules of the world in a way, without them even necessarily realising consciously that that’s what you’re doing.
Owen Kingston:
And to do it in a playful way, so that they’re learning on the job, rather than sitting and making them read a rule book before you even begin. We tried it, and it worked really well. It was fun. People had a good time. We had a good time, which is always a good sign. We did the two weeks and there were things we learned, so we made some changes. We wanted to make some upgrades to the set, as well. So we then had about a month after those first shows, then we started again with a run, and we put loads of tickets on sale for several weeks.
We also wrote a second episode, because one of the things I was really keen to replicate was that idea of episodic television, that you come play the show, play through a story, but then leave and come back and continue the story at a later date. It’s like being the star of your own TV show.
We’d experimented a little bit with episodic, immersive theatre before. We’d done a part two to For King and Country, which had worked pretty well. But that was very much like having two movies. It was like having a movie, and then a sequel. The Bridge Command was a shorter show. It was only an hour long – the length of a TV drama. We wanted to see if we could make the idea of sequel work, only give it more of that television sort of vibe. I’m a big believer in narrative structure. For our longer- two hour, three hour – shows, we would follow a movie structure, in terms of the plot and pacing. So, for Bridge Command we looked at TV models, and how we could replicate that.
When we came back after a month of downtime, to make adjustments, we came back with the original episode one, as it now called, and an episode two. Then we wrote a new episode every three or four weeks. And we thought, we’ll just keep it running, because it was paying for itself. We had enough people coming back, or coming for the first time, that it was just about able to bump along without losing money. It wasn’t really making money, but it was paying for itself. It was providing work for people. So we thought, let’s just keep it running as long as we can. We’re enjoying doing it, so let’s see what happens.
We started that main run in September 2019, and we ran it until the start of the lockdown in 2020. We closed just before the weekend that Boris Johnson announced the lockdown. In that time we think we created nine different shows, including specials. There were five core episodes, and there were several one-offs that we made. We did a Halloween episode, and we did an episode with a challenge scenario that was a bit like the kobayashi maru in Star Trek. We did a couple of different hidden episodes that you could unlock if you made certain choices in one of the core five episodes. Then we crafted some extra content, and mainly for people who were really keen and came multiple times and were clearly really enjoying it and wanted more than we had. What we discovered was that between the first episode and the second episode, the fall off was around 50%. And what I mean by that was, if you came to see the first episode, only about half of those people would come back for episode two. And the ones that didn’t come back would often cite things like the fact that the set was a bit rubbish, which it was.
voidspace:
I do remember as you stepped into the airlock, you did have to be careful not to breathe too hard in case it fell apart on you.
Owen Kingston:
It was that bad. We were well aware the set was rubbish, and fair enough. Some people outright said to us: I really like the concept, but your set is terrible. If you ever do a proper version of this, I’d be interested.
voidspace:
Suspension of disbelief, storytelling and game can only get them so far.
Owen Kingston:
Absolutely. So some people didn’t come back, I think because of that. For some people, it just wasn’t their bag. Maybe they wanted something a bit more highbrow. Maybe they just didn’t really like sci-fi. But of the people who came back for more after episode one, of that roughly half of the audience who did come back for a second episode, I would say probably 90% of them came back for all of the remaining episodes.
voidspace:
Wow, that’s hardcore. Most companies would love that percentage of hardcore repeaters.
Owen Kingston:
Again, that made me sit up and take notice. There’s some bottled lightning here, which is always the thing you’re looking for. I often think that the challenge with any artistic medium is not to give people what they want, but it’s to give people what they didn’t realise they wanted. That’s really hard to do.
That’s why I kind of don’t believe in the whole idea of the algorithm that’s going to determine how big a TV show is going to get, because I don’t believe a computer can really give people what they don’t realise they want. Give you what you were looking for, maybe, but not what you weren’t looking for, if that makes sense. And that’s what Parabolic’s built its success on, really, on ferreting that stuff out and then finding it.
And I thought, we’ve got another one here. And I remember sitting there at one point thinking, this is a multimillion-pound idea. If only we could get the capital to realise it, this thing could really make some cash. So, we were bumbling along, making shows, enjoying them. People were having a good time. And it got to late November, and we were running two shows at the same time in the COLAB venue.
We were running Bridge Command in the basement, and we were running Crisis? What Crisis? upstairs. Running two shows at the same time is difficult for a small company. Very hard work. But during that time, these investors came along. We hadn’t invited them specifically, didn’t know who they were, but they came and played the show. It wasn’t the best show we’ve done, to be honest with you. I got an email from the boss the next day saying that they loved it and hated it at the same time. They loved it because the concept is brilliant, and they hated it because the set was terrible. But they could really see the potential in it, they wanted to invest in some immersive theatre and thought Bridge Command might be the show to invest in.
You never think you’re going to get an email like that. Never in a million years.
Owen Kingston:
When I got it, I didn’t really believe it. I thought it couldn’t be true, that someone was having a laugh. The minute we walked into their office in the City, we knew they were serious. We sat down in this table with this lovely group of people who just gushed at us about the show and the concept, and talked about what they wanted to do for it, how they wanted to fund it and make a really good, high production values version of it, and how they thought it could make a lot of money if it was done in that way.
In New Year 2020 I came back to talk about it with one of them. We spent a couple of hours just talking through how it would work and what it would be like and how they would structure it and how they would help us, not just by putting money into it, but also with the business support for scaling up to that extent. If you put several million pounds into a tiny company, you’d split it apart: it’s not built to hold that. I certainly wouldn’t have known what to do with that kind of finance and how to manage it properly. So, the beginning of a real beautiful partnership was born, and we started working with them.
We started working at the start of 2020, and things were going swimmingly well. And we were still running the old version of the show in the background, because we’re still learning things from it. Then suddenly, along came Covid-19 and the whole thing was shut down. I thought it was the end, but a few days later, I had a chat with the big boss and he said to me, no, they were going to fund us as long as the pandemic lasted, because they thought that when the pandemic was over, people were going to want to do this sort of thing again. This is an investment firm with huge deep pockets, so they were able to afford to just pay us through the pandemic, and keep us alive. It’s what kept me going during the pandemic, working on this show.
We managed to get some cultural recovery money for parabolic. We managed to do a few other shows online. House of Cenci particularly, was a real success for us online. We won an award for it, and it was another one of those things. We managed to give people something they didn’t realise they wanted.
Again. I think we managed to broaden our audience base. There were people who maybe wouldn’t have come to see some of our other work, really into House of Cenci.
voidspace:
That show, particularly, ended up being one of the inspirations for the voidspace. Seeing how people who were into all different sorts of interactive media could come together, and how these things can cross pollinate each other and feed off each other, reach new audiences, give people new ideas that they didn’t even know they could have had before.
Owen Kingston:
We did those online projects during the pandemic that kept the money flowing. But in the background, I was working on Bridge Command the whole time, and actually had to step back from some of these projects a bit to keep working on Bridge Command, because doing a big project is a lot of work. But after a couple of years of pandemic, things started to return to normal and the investors said it was time to start looking for a venue and making the show happen. A couple of years and about 3 million quid later, here we are, nearly ready to open the doors to a movie quality set.
I can’t overstate how beautiful this set is, especially in comparison with the sort of cheesy, 1970s wobbly set that we had before. This thing is on a different level, and to be honest, on a different level to a lot of show sets that I’ve seen, it’s remarkable. The spend per square foot is astronomically high.
voidspace:
I can imagine. What’s interesting is that you think that your benchmark is TV and film, but then you think, even before CGI – and even more so post CGI – how much of that is actually fake, how much of it’s patched in in post-production, and what an actual studio set looks like is nothing like the finished product. So, to bring the fantasy actually to life, in three dimensions, to make it touch-real, is a massive achievement.
Owen Kingston:
Yeah, we say movie quality, but it has to be a lot better than movie quality, because the audience get up close to it. In Star Trek the Next Generation, whenever the doors slide open, it’s a couple of ASMs on either side of the doors, pulling them open. There’s no automated stuff there at all. The sound is, famously, the sound of a piece of paper sliding out of an envelope, which is then played as Foley. There are some wonderful outtakes, where the ASM is not paying attention and doesn’t open the door in time, and Picard slams straight into it, and things like that.
What we’ve got is a fully automated set which is integrated with the game engine, which has had a significant upgrade from where it was in 2019, to allow us to do loads of things that we couldn’t do before. So, playing Bridge Command really is the closest you’re going to get, certainly at the moment, to being in a sci-fi TV show is coming in and playing bridge command. The automated doors really are automated, and they make a lovely sound when they open too.
Every single system on the ship has a physical prop attached to it. When a ship’s system is damaged to a certain point, the connected prop activates, and the system won’t repair until you go and interact with the prop physically and do what’s needed to make the repair.
voidspace:
You have to physically fix the ship! I was excited enough by the systems in 2019. I remember in the original Bridge Command, you had a system of fuel rods that were physical rods that you stuck into a box, with a fishbowl on top. There was a fuel rod in a suitcase, and when the ship ran low on fuel, you had to stick it in. Now, obviously, it’s suspension of disbelief, it’s low budget, it’s string and sticky tape. But it was very exciting to physically do something and have it actually have an impact on the ship systems, and on the world of the show. I don’t think that’s something that I have seen done in immersive theatre before.
Owen Kingston:
It hadn’t really been done up to that point. It’s been done a bit more since. I know Peaky Blinders used some of those ideas, and made some great interactable bits of set. There was a safe that you could crack, and things like that. Secret Cinema have used some interactive tech since as well. But certainly up to that point, I wasn’t aware of any immersive show that used interactive props in that way. You do have that kind of tech in escape rooms. What we’re doing is taking that tech, but then giving it a real strong story purpose that feels genuinely in-world.
In escape rooms it feels very gamey. You’re left asking: “But why has this person left this elaborate system of puzzles, in order to open a simple drawer?” It doesn’t make any sense. It really stretches the credulity of logic. Great fun puzzles, but with only a fig leaf of story as an overlay. We’ve introduced the narrative storytelling aspect as part of that.
The fuel rods are still there, on the ship. We call them something else now. When you plug one into the wall, there’s a little lighting indicator which shows you how full they are. There’s RFID technology (the same thing that makes an office key-card work) in the rods, which stores how much fuel they have on them.
There’s all kinds of stuff in there, now. There’s a wonderful system which allows you to increase the amount of coolant that your ship has available to it, by plugging in a hose into a unit, and it makes a noise that sounds like it’s pumping coolant into the ship. There’s a very elaborate self-destruct mechanism, which involves typing in codes and arming a bomb to go off.
voidspace:
How do you make self-destruct work, though? There has to be a point where that mechanic breaks, because you can’t actually destroy the set. I remember in, again, the first version of Bridge Command, I was put on engineering, the role that was in charge of keeping the ship from blowing up. I think I managed to blow the ship up twice in the course of about half an hour. When the ship blew up back then, the screens all went blank, and there were sirens and the smoke machine going, and stuff.
Owen Kingston:
It is a game over moment. And I think there’s different ways of responding to that, and often that depends on the group that you’ve got in front of you, obviously. Ideally, the group survives and their story continues.
voidspace:
But you’ve got an escape pod, haven’t you?
Owen Kingston:
We have, yes. Each ship’s got a shuttle on it. There are two ships, now. Originally, in 2019, we’d only built the one ship, the CNS Talavaar . Now we have two large starships. They’re about four times the size of the original Talavaar. Each ship has a shuttle as well, so there are actually four ships in all.
We can let people work together: you can have two different ships cooperating on the same mission. You can, in theory, go head-to-head as well. That’s something that won’t happen all that often, because the story doesn’t really go that direction, but it could do, depending on what the audience choose to do.
voidspace:
On the topic of audience choice, how does the interactivity in Bridge Command work?
Owen Kingston:
We’ve obviously got a finite number of actors in the building at any given time, and we ration that out. So, each ship has a number of actors assigned to it for each show, which means that you can see a number of different faces over the course of that show. If you’ve seen an actor play one character, and then ten minutes later it’s the same face, but they’re supposed to be playing a different character, it doesn’t feel very good. So, we try and plan out the flow of the mission to make sure that we’re not over-promising the number of people that you will definitely get to meet. There are plenty of characters that can sit behind a mask of some sort or another, or a helmet, etc.
voidspace:
In the original, you relied a lot on text-based interface, to increase the number of characters we could interact with, while keeping actual cast numbers quite small.
Owen Kingston:
In this version of the show, we really wanted to deliver on some of those sci-fi things that we weren’t able to deliver on the first time. First time around, there were no talking heads on view screens to communicate with. We just didn’t have the tech for it. This time around, we are going to do that. But then that means that you have to be a bit more careful with your actors, and how many are there to be spoken to. There’s also an audio communications possibility, and there’s still the text-based thing. There are actors that come onto the ship as well.
The lovely thing about writing a show that sits on a starship is that it’s like a ship in a bottle. You’re in a protected environment, you’ve got unity of place, and there’s a limited number of ways that other beings can enter that space. Because you’re in space, so unless something docks with you, you’re not going to meet new people. That gives you a way of controlling the types of interaction to some extent, which feels logical and like it makes sense in the world.
voidspace:
And what was interesting for me, just from an interactivity point of view, is that it’s not just a matter of how the actors reach out to you, but the way in which each person in each bridge position is given a job. Their job might just be influencing numbers on a screen or influencing coordinates on a map, but the way you’ve planned it, they all mesh together, so that you feel that you are influencing key bits of the story through your role, through the computer game side of it as well.
Owen Kingston:
Yeah, you feel like you have had an impact, and there’s feedback which lets you see how you’ve had an impact as well. The story is usually structured around mission parameters. You are part of the UCN, the United Confederation Navy. You’re part of a military organisation, but you’re given missions which are not always about fighting. There are plenty of things out there which have got nothing to do with fighting. What we’ve really tried to do with this version of the show, is enable the pacifist who doesn’t want to shoot anybody, but nevertheless wants to go out and do the sort of stuff that you see in Star Trek. Strange new worlds, exploring and pushing the frontiers of science. That is as valid a part of what this show is about as going and shooting up bad guys.
voidspace:
That’s really lovely.
Owen Kingston:
It’s quite important as well, because that was one of the things that we always thought was a limitation in the original show, because it’s based on a game engine which was designed around space combat. It always drags you in that direction. And we’ve really fought this time around to make sure that there are whole missions where combat is entirely optional. And indeed, there was one we were working on today where combat is probably not even going to come up as an option, because you’re interacting with the other environmental things.
voidspace:
I always find that stuff more interesting. Not because I’m a pacifist, but just because I think combat can be a very linear way of solving problems. You either blow it up or you don’t. So, it’s great if you’re putting in lots of options for finding creative ways of solving problems in the world of the show.
Owen Kingston:
Obviously there are some people who do just want to get on a starship and blow things up, and so you want to cater for them as well.
voidspace:
That can be fun, sometimes.
Owen Kingston:
Yes, absolutely. Everything’s built around a set of mission parameters. You get given your mission at the beginning, and that is going to detail where the story is heading and what your objectives are. We’ve tried to keep that relatively simple because we’ve only got an hour. There’s a lot to do in that hour, and there’s a lot can go wrong in that hour, so we keep the basic story beats relatively simple. We will give you those basic parameters upfront, but then we usually try and build some kind of twist into that that you’re not expecting, so the potential is there to take you off in different directions.
We also like to be able to give people genuine choice. There’s a clear objective at the end of each mission, but how you achieve it is up to you. Even whether you achieve it is up to you. You might decide halfway through that you shouldn’t be doing whatever it was you set out to do, or perhaps that something else is more important instead, and those choices are real. There may be consequences for whatever path you go down, but you get to choose that yourself, and then live with those consequences yourself. And they’re all valid. It’s not like there’s an obviously right option. We’ve tried to keep the grey area.
voidspace:
That’s what I liked about the original Bridge Command. It’s very unusual to see something like this, where there are also creative ways to push against the original structure. The anti-authoritarian in me really appreciates that.
Owen Kingston:
That’s something that’s grown over time. When we first started trying to make this kind of work, we took baby steps. The original For King and Country pretty much always ends in the same manner. It’s more about choosing the route to the ending and what you think the game is. Halfway through, you realise that what you are doing in that show is not what you originally thought it was, but something else entirely. But that show was quite tame, by comparison to some of the things we’ve gone on to do since. The more shows we’ve done, the more we’ve tried to push the envelope with what genuine choice we can allow. Crisis? What Crisis? genuinely had multiple different endings, which we didn’t really have in For King and Country.
Now, with Bridge Command we’re trying to give people even more control over what their story looks like. We did that to some extent with the first version of the show, but in the that first version, we had a very strong story narrative, which played out across multiple episodes and joined together really well. When you’re trying to tell a story, you are limited by what choices you can allow and still keep the story on track.
A lot of us working on this, we love role playing games, tabletop RPGs, and we’ve tried to draw on that experience to really create much more of an open world feel with Bridge Command this time around. There are lots of story threads and narrative threads, but you discover them through the missions that you go on. You’ll be sent off on missions, and follow the mission objectives, and then those story threads will creep in at the edges, and if you pull at them and follow them, then you’ll get something interesting out of that. And it means that a group can play the same mission multiple times and go off in very different directions.
The other way we’ve developed the new version of Bridge Command is what happens when you book. At the moment, there are really only two options for booking. You can book a military mission or you can book an exploration mission. We’re not saying specifically what that mission is going to be when you book it. When you show up on site, we will give you an exploration mission or a military mission from a stable of different options. And we will record what you do, individually and as a group. We’re building this database back-end whereby there’s a record, of the mission that you played with a specific group of people and then your individual player records, which are then linked. When the GM has got your group in into the bar, ready, they can look at who’s there, they can see what missions they’ve played in the past, and then they can select something either that none of you have done before or something that a few of you have done before, but they’ll nuance it so that it feels different. In theory, every time you go, you should get something different. And it should feel like a new story. It’s not like you’re replaying the same thing that you did before.
voidspace:
I know that immersive theatre fans can have somewhat obsessive and completist tendencies, on occasion. During the first iteration of Bridge Command, diehards would play the episode more than once to see what the different endings to the more linear storylines were, but it’s very exciting if that information can be used to make the whole flavour of the episode feel different.
Owen Kingston:
You might play the same set of mission parameters twice, for example. It may be that your mission is go to this mining station because you’re taking over the defence of this mining station and you’re going to patrol around the area and see what happens. Those are the mission parameters, and those are fixed. You might play that mission a couple of times, but each time you play it, something different will happen. And we’ll be able to keep track of that.
voidspace:
I’ve seen you manage that, even in the prior iteration of Bridge Command. Parabolic, historically, has always been really good at taking care of its fans. If you know that there is somebody who is a familiar face, you will try and throw in something different for them.
It’s a very personal approach and it’s very flexible and creative and shows a lot of care and love for your audience. To say: We will try our best to give you something special because we know who you are and what you’ve done. To find a way of formalising that, so that you don’t have to have a personal relationship with everybody who walks through the door, and still provide personal level of experience, is a beautiful thing.
Owen Kingston:
It’s a real lofty ambition. And the caveat is, obviously nobody’s tried that before. But that’s what we’re aiming for, whether we hit it or not. People will judge further down the line, but I’m saying here and now, that’s what we’re aiming for. I hope we hit it, or at least partially hit it. Even if we only get 75% of the way there, hopefully that will still be really good.
voidspace:
It’s still an improvement, isn’t it? It’s still an improvement on nothing.
Owen Kingston:
It means every show is then a bespoke thing. It feels crafted and it is unique to that set of individuals.
You might come back a few times and play the same set of mission parameters a few times. Hopefully, the way that story plays out each time could be radically different, and you’ll meet different characters and different things will happen. We’ve planned in a variety of recurring characters. Sometimes we’re going to lock a character to a particular face. So, an actor will only ever play that one character. There are also characters that any of our core team could play. But if you’ve met a certain person in a certain role, you’ll always see them in that role going forward. Let’s say you’ve met me playing a certain character, I will always need to be that character for you.
voidspace:
Oh, blimey, that’s going to be a nightmare to schedule. How can you do that, if you’re giving people free choice in terms of what shows they go to, but you don’t have free choice in terms of when you work? You’ll just have to live on set, in a cupboard.
Owen Kingston:
It’s going to be hard. And what it sometimes might mean is that if you’ve seen me play that particular character and you’re on a show with a fellow audience member who’s seen someone else play that character, we can’t put that character in that show, because it wouldn’t make sense. There are a couple of ways we can make it work, which are a little bit interesting, but, generally speaking, that isn’t going to be possible.
We have to try and balance those things out, and there is no guarantee it will always work. Sometimes it was just my big ambition, and sometimes we might just have to hold our hands up and we’ll just have to run with it and put that character on. I’m sure people will be all right with that if we have to do it, but we want to try and avoid it as far as we can.
voidspace:
For most of my original Bridge Command in 2019, pretty much everyone was played by the same three people. And I loved it – that was part of the joy. That ambition is a good one, but it does highlight a real difference in potentially taste and expectation between your old-school, immersive fans – maybe those who’ve come through Punchdrunk, who take an active pleasure in seeing performers playing different characters, different characters played by different performers – and an audience drawn from the wider world, who perhaps prefer a bit more consistency in their suspension of disbelief.
Owen Kingston:
The other thing that is new to this version of Bridge Command is that you, as a player or as a participant, will have your own character sheet – a character record in our database – when you come to play the show. And we’ve not closed the door on the idea that you might have multiple characters within our database, and each character will have certain things attached to them. You’ll have a rank, for one thing, that will increase over time. You’ll get promoted when you do particularly cool things. You might get medals, you might get particular kind of mission patches for things you’ve done, physical patches that go on your uniform.
voidspace:
Are you going to keep a separate uniform for everybody or is it going to be Velcro?
Owen Kingston:
There are loads of Velcro patches. When you arrive, we’ll already have built your uniform for you. Or, if you really want to, you can buy one of the boiler suits and buy your patches that are relevant and then you can just stick it all on yourself and bring it with you. Some people will want to do that as well. And then they might want to embellish them themselves and all that kind of thing.
voidspace:
The cosplayers will love that.
Owen Kingston:
When you come, we’ll tie your character to your email address, and then anything that you’ve done, we record in the database. We’ll record how your show turned out, and alongside that we’ll record any particular standout moments you’ve had with particular characters in the show, and any particular standout things that you’ve done on the bridge.
What we haven’t shut the door on is the idea that you might also want to start again, with a different group. You might want a completely different role. You might have gone down the path of, for example, wanting to be a science officer, and everything is all science, all the time. Then you might be like, nah, I’m sick of science now. I want to come back and start anew, doing something else. And then you’d have a different record, so then it’s a question of when you come, of asking who you want to be. Then we’ll get that uniform out, and away you go.
voidspace:
That’s a scary level of replayability.
Owen Kingston:
It would be automated some extent because it’s tied to your email address. So, depending on who you’ve booked as, that’s who you’re going to be. And then that potentially then sorts out the problem of, you’ve seen one person playing a given character, and somebody else has seen a different person playing that character. Because we could say: Well, we’ve got a weird mix today. We’d like to run a particular mission. Would you be up for playing it as your other character?
voidspace:
That’s a great idea.
Owen Kingston:
We also want to make a fuss of who you are in the world of the show. We want to have things like throwing you a promotion party, for a big promotion.
The first person who reaches the rank of captain, we are definitely throwing a party for. We’ll let them have the bar for an evening and then come down and we’ll make a big fuss of them.
voidspace:
That is great marketing, in and of itself.
Owen Kingston:
Those things go on YouTube and people can see it. That’s the kind of world we want to create, where the people feel like they inhabit it, and they feel like they belong. It’s their world. And there are plans in place to allow the players to extend the universe. Some of the exploration missions involve going to a star system that we’ve not checked out before, and we want you to report back on it. At the end of that, we’ll say: Okay, that star is currently known to us as Epsilon Eridani. 3579. We want a sexier name than that. What would you like to name the star system? As long as it’s not Bowsie McBowface or Starry McStarface. You can have named something that then exists in the world, which would be amazing.
voidspace:
Oh, that’s a brilliant idea. This is all reminding me of something like Eve Online, where you have that kind of MMORPG type world that’s very open.
Owen Kingston:
Eve Online, but make it live action. I guess I hadn’t thought of that, but that’s a really good way of describing it.
That doesn’t preclude people just dropping in and out, and it doesn’t preclude people just coming and doing it as a one off and having a great time. But I’m aware of how I like to engage with work in that sort of way, and there are plenty of other people who do as well.
voidspace:
If it were ever a possibility, that had ever been done before.
Owen Kingston:
That’s kind of what we’re here for really, to try and make that, and to make it something that can last. Obviously, we’ve got to sell enough tickets to make it pay for itself, so that we can be there long enough so this stuff really pays off. We want to be there for five years, if we can. I’m aware that The Burnt City wanted to be there for five years – and they are a much bigger operation than us – and it didn’t work out that way, and that might happen to us too. We’ve got to be realistic. But our investors have got deep pockets and they’re in it to try and make it work. So if we give it the absolute best shot we hope we can pick up enough momentum and that there are enough people who love it and who want to keep coming back and who want to reengage with it, and there are enough new people who want to come for the first time, that it sustains itself. The potential is there.
I think that it could open up franchise opportunities all over the world. Nobody else is doing this, and if it takes off, there could be one in Paris, there could be one in New York. But obviously, that’s a mountain to climb. We’re at the very start of it.
voidspace:
What are your plans for the show, in the medium term?
Owen Kingston:
Once we’ve got the basic missions up and running, the plan is to then start our first season of episodes. The episodes feel a bit more like the original Bridge Command in that it’s more tightly, narratively driven. To start with, at least every episode is going to involve both ships at the same time. So, every episode is a multi-ship extravaganza with two crews each doing their own separate thing, who might then split into two other crews going off in shuttles.
There’s a lot more to work with, and so more actors to put into that, because you’ve got potentially up to 28 people all in one big show. At the heart of Bridge Command, there is a games master. A dungeon master, who runs the scenario and calls the plays and calls the shots, and makes sure the actors know what they’re doing and coordinates everything. In an episode there are then two game masters working on one show together, one to look after one ship, one to look after the other. And one of them is overall in charge of what’s happening narratively, and the other one is there to support. So it’s a much bigger operation, and a much more complicated operation as well. What we want to be able to do is launch very high.
This comes back to the issue of high stakes that we were talking about at the beginning. The missions are, not low stakes, but they are, as you said, very much like a ‘monster of the week’ episode of a TV series. Obviously, in a sci-fi TV series, you also have the wider plot arc, and that’s where the episodes come in.
We want to be able to, over the course of a year at a time, offer a series of different episodes that make up a story arc that tells a grander story within the Bridge Command universe, with much higher stakes, with things that carry over and have importance for the future of humanity. The destiny of the human race is in your hands, and there are loads of plans for what those things could be. We’ve mapped out a first season, so we need to get everything working first, make sure that all the parts of the set work correctly.
voidspace:
That’s a good way of squaring the circle. By the time people have done enough missions, with their own personal journey, they’re going to feel invested enough in the world to maybe give up some of that personal agency. The payoff you get there is the delivery of the wider narrative.
Owen Kingston:
Yes, and being part of a much bigger, larger-than-life story where you as the audience are caught up in something that’s much bigger than you. That’s the idea of how that should feel. And obviously having two crews in world at the same time, and having the opportunity for them to cooperate in different ways, for them to dock with each other and pass across between the two ships, and to have a location as part of our facility, which is something we never had in the original version of the show, where you can have away team missions.
We’re trying to make the off-ship location a versatile space that we can turn into various different locations that you might want to visit, whether it’s a space station or like the interior of an asteroid or a floating science facility in the middle of nowhere. There’s a versatile space there that we can involve in those missions as well. So there’s a load of stuff to add – extra bells and whistles, if you like – but I don’t think we’ll launch that before the autumn.
voidspace:
Is there anything else that you’d like to say about what the future might hold for Bridge Command?
Owen Kingston:
A long-term goal is to provide a longer Bridge Command experience. I’ve done some brilliant immersive theatre stuff that was durational overnight, particularly. I love that idea of going to sleep in the world of a show. It’s always really magical, because you bring something of that liminal dream space. Actually going to sleep whilst still in the world of show is a magical thing to do, so we want to be able to try and do something like that. There are lots of legal hurdles to clear in order to make that work and there are a lot of issues to figure out. But we have built bunks into the ship sets. There are really quite comfortable bunks on both of the ships, and a lot of space, and toilets and everything you could want to make sleeping over comfortable.
voidspace:
In-world toilets. I think this might be a completely new innovation.
Owen Kingston:
Yeah, there’s none of this: “We’ve got a dock because I need to go and have a pee”. No holding it till the end of the mission. No, there’s a toilet.
I would love to be able to offer overnight or whole weekends of living in the Bridge Command universe, where people can just take a little mini break, essentially, and go and be in space for a while.
voidspace:
That’d be lovely. The question is: would people ever leave?
Owen Kingston:
Would we ever leave? I think that’s one of the big questions.
Bridge Command takes off on Wednesday 27 March 2024
Find out more and book tickets here