In the first year we were testing if we could do 12 shows in 12 months. And there was a pandemic, but we did 18. Going into our second year, we wondered if that had been a fluke. Then the second year we did 24 shows, and so we knew we could we do it sustainably. So in the third year we did 20 productions, …the year after that I think we did around 30 productions. And then this year we surpassed 100, and have done a few others as well.
Joe Strickland’s decision when founding Chronic Insanity – to find creative ways to make theatre at scale – has paid off, as the number of shows (and the number of five star reviews and awards testifies). As the company presents a two week residency at the Clapham Omnibus Theatre and online, we talk to Joe about his unique approach to making interactive theatre, how access and sustainability can be baked into immersive and how quantity needn’t mean sacrificing quality.
Voidspace:
Welcome to the Voidspace! Can you tell me a bit about yourself?
Joe Strickland:
My name is Joe. I’m a theatre maker, digital producer, creative technologist and access consultant. I am artistic director and CEO of a Nottingham-based theatre company called Chronic Insanity. We aim to do 12 shows each year and really push what theatre can be and can be defined as. So we do a lot of traditional new writing, but we also do lots of immersive, interactive and playable theatre, lots of digital online stuff and then lots of things that we kind of deem super-live, whether that’s gig theatre or playing with other kinds of theatre forms. We’ve done 100 productions in the past five years and a good chunk of those have been digital or interactive and playable in some way.
Voidspace:
How do you go about scheduling that kind of level of work and output?
Joe Strickland:
We tend to have an end of year planning meeting where we come up with just sometimes quite an arbitrary, here’s what the 12 shows next year are going to be. We know that half of those are probably not going to happen. We know that we’ll have opportunities arise that we didn’t plan and have to meet quickly. Sometimes we’ve turned shows around in a couple of weeks. One show we did as a reaction to a news event and we did that show, and released it as a digital production in under 48 hours in order to make something relevant. One of the things I like about theatre is how it tries to talk about current events. But I dislike the way that theatre gets made, which means that a new script takes like five years to get on stage, in which case it’s not talking about current events. And if you do digital theatre about the digital cultural space, which moves incredibly quickly, that’s not going to cut it. You have to be able to make stuff quickly.
I like to think of the structure of the company as like a series of concentric circles. So, I’m in the centre. I do a large chunk of the creative work. I’m involved in almost every project, if not in a creative capacity, then I’m definitely producing it. And then we have our co-founder, Nat Henderson, and a few of our regular producers and collaborators, Lottie Holder, Emily Holyoake, in a kind of next ring out. Then we have some of our associate artists. We have between 15 and 20 around the country who are performers, writers, directors and all sorts of different creatives. And then we have some people who are more specialised creatives that we work with every so often. Like Robin Gallardo-Parsons, our immersive sound designer, who we work with every couple of years when an immersive audio project is on the cards. It’s about 25 people of some kind, in some degree, under the banner of Chronic Insanity at any one time.
Voidspace:
With the sort of level of work that you managed to create, just pulling together that team is inspiring.
Joe Strickland:
We started when Nat and I founded the company. We were both postgrad students. I think our first production was in September 2019. Some of the best theatre we were seeing were student productions that people had done in a week and a half and were being selected for national theatre festivals. And we thought we could do a show in a month. And if we just pick shows we know we can do in a couple of weeks, then I think that the amount of time you put into something always reflects in its quality. I think there can be diminishing returns and that 20% of the effort will get you 80% of the show and then it’s just refining. And if you’re fine with a four star show, which I think a lot of us definitely would be, then for the effort of one five star show, you can make five four star shows in that kind of thought experiment.
That was the hypothesis of the company, and we just kept doing that.
Voidspace:
It’s really exciting. I know quite often a lot of immersive work will particularly lean on the concept of previews. So we’ll call someone in previews for a few weeks and that gives us time to refine it and change it and get it perfect. And you can’t expect to see the finished product until it’s a couple of months down the line, at which point you may know the outcome.
Joe Strickland:
I think we’re fortunate in that we always approached it from a very different space of coming at it like amateurs. In the sense of doing it because we love it. The actual root of the word.
One of the founding principles of Chronic Insanity was that we wanted theatre-making to be the thing we spent most of our time doing and not a hobby that we hope will become a career. Or that we work five days a week to spend half a day on the weekend writing something. We wanted to spend most of our time doing it. So given that that’s not the norm, we might have to invent this from the ground up and figure out a way of making performance and theatre and experiences for people, where we can spend most of our time doing it. And the first year was that sort of experiment.
Of course, there was a pandemic in the middle of it, which is one of the ways that we found a lot of people. We made a lot of connections to people online who then saw us as a company using, I think, quite a lo-fi approach. It didn’t matter if it’s not finished or perfect. We were performing it and we were telling stories at a time when that was difficult. People got on board with that idea and philosophy.
And in our first year, we aimed for 12 shows. We did 18 productions. We worked with over 100 people. One show we did in August of that year during lockdown had a cast of over 50 – an online digital show. And then a lot of those people ended up being invited to become associate artists of the company. And we are still working together five years later. I think it’s roughly half in the East Midlands, so Nottingham, Derby, Leicestershire, Lincoln. Places like that. And then the other half are national, and occasionally international.
Voidspace:
A lot of this really resonates with the kind of journey that I’m going through, having started something I loved a few years ago and being halfway through the process of transitioning, scaling up and making commitments.
Joe Strickland:
When we started the company, we spoke to a lot of people that we knew through doing things, like the National Student Drama Festival. And we told them about the plans and lots of people were very encouraging, which was great. But we were getting a lot of feedback from people which was essentially, aim for 12 shows. And hey, if you only do two or three, that’s still really productive! We were like, cool, but you clearly aren’t understanding what we’re actually saying. There was someone, who is now quite a big theatre person in the industry, saying to us that making lots of work is fine, but make sure that the quality of the work is there. You have to be making good work. And I understand that that’s really useful advice for an up-and-coming theatre company. If what you’re trying to do is compete in the economics and the capitalism of theatre, where there are very few cracks for emerging companies, you have to make sure that you are doing that.
It feels like you have to win a major competition, have a Edinburgh fringe success or get picked up from the London fringes. And that wasn’t the route that we felt like we were capable of going down. So we didn’t buy into that idea. When we started we decoded to try and do something else because if we can make it work on our terms, then we’re never going to have to keep trying to fit in and keep trying to do something else from the get-go. In the first year we were testing if we could do 12 shows in 12 months. And there was a pandemic, but we did 18.
Going into our second year, we wondered if that had been a fluke. Was that somehow because of lockdown or because we had the energy to start out with. Then the second year we did 24 shows, and so we knew we could we do it sustainably.
So in the third year we decided to do it in a really sustainable way. And I think we did 20 productions and then we thought: This was an experiment, we’ve made a hypothesis, we’ve repeated it, we have tweaked it to be sustainable and secure and we can keep doing it. And then the year after that I think we did around 30 productions. And then this year we surpassed 100, and have done a few others as well.
Voidspace:
How do you make it economically viable?
Joe Strickland:
I don’t think the way that we’ve run Chronic Insanity is necessarily the way that anyone could run any company. I think it’s been very bespoke to me and my collaborators at various points throughout our lifetime as a company. Are we haemorrhaging money or can we make the books balance every year? I think we’ve largely been able to do that every year and part of that is because we were in a position where, pre-lockdown, I was doing a PhD and I was looking at blending theatre and emerging experience technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, and web-based experiences and what liveness meant in a digital and in a technological world.
I think our first show post-lockdown was May 2020. We had a show which was also a script written about the dark web and different people visiting it for different reasons. So it made sense to put it online. The script was already written and we felt confident the digital theatre would work and we had people who could be in it. So we made that and then we were like, well let’s keep going every month and we won’t hold ourselves to it if we don’t want to or if it gets too much. But we’ll try and pick shows that are simpler. So that show with 50 people in, that was months away and we spent three months organising it. And in the June we did a show, I think, that was very few people, or was just me filming it in our house. And then in July we had a slightly more complex one. So while we say we release a show every month, they tend to take two, three months and we just have a big Gantt chart where everything is slightly overlapping. And so in one month we might be writing one show while we’re producing a second, while we’re filming and editing a third. But also I wanted to be able to be agile and responsive and there have been opportunities, when things have come up very last minute, a space is available with two weeks to go.
Our first major London fringe run for a show where we received Off West End nominations and five star reviews, for the first time in our career, was when someone dropped out and we had to put on a show in Clapham in a month. And we were like, we think we can get this together. And we did.
Voidspace:
Do people worry about the idea of quality versus quantity?
Joe Strickland:
Early on, some people were worried that if we go for quantity we’re not going to get quality. But we’ve received really great feedback from audiences. We’ve received brilliant reviews and not just for one or two shows but for like 20, 30 of them. We have received multiple four star reviews from all over the place, all different types of publication. We’ve been in end of year lists in the Guardian, and others. We’ve had multiple nominations and award successes. Vault Origin, Popcorn, New Writing Award in Edinburgh, Digital Culture Network Awards, the Off West End Awards a couple of times, winning and nominating. And we just made a lot of stuff and when you throw a lot at the wall, some of it sticks.
Voidspace:
I suppose the digital side is quite important. I’d love to hear about how that introduces your practice.
Joe Strickland:
It’s really difficult to fully define what digital theatre is because you realise that you’re just arbitrarily drawing a line somewhere. So if we say digital theatre is national theatre at home, it’s getting a film crew in a theatre space and filming a show. Okay, but then what if the audience isn’t there? What if we film it all in one shot? Are we making a film if it’s just a one shot thing? If you put a GoPro at the back of a West End theatre and it looks awful and it’s technically digital theatre, and it’s not interesting. But does it actually feel live? Does it replicate that sense of presence you get in a real life space? Or do I feel like I’m watching something that’s been very curated and can I see the continuity errors and notice that actually these bits are probably filmed not in front of an audience, but these bits are compared to say, a vast array of other interactive and immersive things you can do online, like interactive text fiction or making just video games or virtual reality experiences, alternate reality games and treasure hunts through different websites and web pages.
You know, I don’t think we’ve ever actually done a Zoom play, where we just have different people in Zoom windows. We’ve done a lot of recordings and editing things together, but we’ve also told plays in people’s email inboxes because that’s where the story we wanted to tell took place. And if we have a horror story that takes place in a parent’s WhatsApp group, then let’s automate 12 SIM cards and WhatsApp accounts and let’s just tell it that way.
Voidspace:
Is that why you are bringing together video games and interactive fiction and interactive theatre, to involve the audience?
Joe Strickland:
I think so. I think the definition of theatre was very easy before the end of the 20th century when there was no alternative but to have a story in public take place at the same time in the same place as the audience. Then we invented other ways throughout the 20th century, radio plays, screenplays, telly plays. We started changing things. They all had roots in theatre, but they were pre-recorded and at different points, but they weren’t interactive. I think it’s not necessarily that there are different times or different places.
I think that the main quality of theatre that we like is presence. The idea that it feels like it takes place in a shared space and that co-presence of theatre carries into a lot of these digital spaces. Now some people misinterpret co-presence as co-location, or at the same time as well, rather than just at the same place. But I think actually a broader definition of it being co-present helps clarify some of these elements. Presence is in the eye of the beholder, right? There are people who can hallucinate presences that aren’t there. There are people who can daydream and be oblivious to presences that are very nearby. So our perception of presence is very easy to trick, it is not very accurate. And the idea that people standing in front of you make theatre feel present is false. It’s a perceptual quality of the work and it’s in the eye of the audience.
And so if I can watch some text moving up on my phone and I know that that’s what it looks like when somebody at the same time in a different space is writing to me and I can see that happening, then that is co-present. Not physically nearby each other and not necessarily even at the same time. You know, with an alternate reality game or something, you’re one or two steps behind the protagonist in the treasure hunt. But I feel like that trail of breadcrumbs still has a presence. It’s like an artefact. And I think that can still feel present with a bit of imagination and sometimes can feel even more present, in the same way that the scariest monsters are ones that aren’t being shown in horror films, where your mind kind of takes ideas and runs with it. Often seeing them ends up with disappointment. Presence, where you’re not actually present but you’re like a step behind. The presence allows you to more vividly imagine that presence.
So much of theatre is already imagination. It’s not just about presence. I think it’s communication with the audience, as well. Like, if you look at a film, almost all films show you everything. They want to tell a story in a location, they go to that location or they computer generate it. They want to have a certain number of people. They get different people. One person plays one character. You don’t have to suspend your disbelief. You don’t have to play along or be an active member of the audience that’s going along with the illusion that’s happening on stage. Film doesn’t do that. TV doesn’t do that, Lots of audio work doesn’t do that. But in theatre, there are very strict limitations set by being in the same place at the same time. Whether those are budgetary, or space. Can we make a hurricane happen? Not really. But if we flash some lights and we play some sound effects, and the audience is being told, believe this. And we do. And I think all of those same ways that we engage with theatre, we engage with the most digital work.
Voidspace:
If you’re watching film, what you’re being asked is to believe that the camera doesn’t exist. You are buying into an idea of there not being a story beyond what you can see on the screen. Whereas I think in theatre, we explicitly buy into it. I will accept that what I’m seeing is very much not complete reality, but I’m going to agree to play along in a different way.
Joe Strickland:
Absolutely. And we’re saying this like it’s a broad thing, there will be people that engage with theatre because they like stories in any form, and that feels like an immediate way to hear a certain type of story. But those people also like film and other things. So when you then start looking at video games that they might deem as being less narratively driven, which isn’t the case, but they might not know that. They might start thinking, well, I don’t see how these things go together.
Another important distinction, a lot of people in theatre are technophobic and not very confident with technology. If they were more confident, they might not be in a very analogue art form, they might be doing film, they might be doing video game design or story writing for other things. There are people in theatre who don’t like technology, who begrudgingly use it and aren’t very confident with that.
So when you start saying, hey, it’s the 21st century now, all of this technical stuff that you don’t understand is included with your art form, that feels threatening. Perhaps people go, oh God, am I going to have to learn how to make a twine experience? And we’re like, no, no, you don’t have to know how to code, you don’t have to do anything differently. We’re just saying that these things belong alongside what you’re doing. Things change. But we’re not saying you. We’re not limiting the opportunity for you to do what you love or for you to watch what you love or to make it. We’re just saying that these other things exist.
And if we have a story that we want to tell and it makes sense to tell it in WhatsApp or in the comment sections of various websites, then we do that. But if it makes sense to tell it in person, it’s why I really like making gig theatre. It’s like the kind of vibe of a gig, but with the kind of narrative and with the storytelling and maybe the kind of emotional highs and lows of theatre. But the reason why I like that so much is because, coming out of a lockdown, it was like, well, we’ve done quite well telling stories online, so why would we tell this in person? It’s so much more money, it’s so much more effort, it’s so much more stress, it’s more difficult to organise and you have to deal with loads of other people and get like a whole read on their energy, and figure out whether what you want to make is actually what they want to make. It’s much smoother, it’s just easier to do it online.
So what is the quality of a thing that means we have to do it in person? Is it because it’s an interactive or a playable thing and you want to be in the room and not have any technology getting in the way of really making something bespoke for the people in your audience? Is it because of live music you feel, rather than listen to a lot of the time, and therefore a show that has that kind of feel of a gig, that plays off the energy of the audience is different every night because the audience is different and you make it for them as you tell the same story. Now that was exciting. Still is for me.
So gig theatre is sort of a genre that has the energy of a live music gig, often with the sort of like talking to the audience, acknowledging that they’re there and that you are on stage making a thing for them. But with all of the kind of drama and storytelling that a theatre show might have, all of the production value as well. Like a gig might just have a backdrop and then the instruments in the band. But the gig theatre show might be more theatrical in the way it looks and is set up, but the way that it is sort of the social contract with the audience is much more. You can chime in. It’s a call and response. We’re making this for you. We are people playing characters and we are referencing that, and we might jump between characters on stage, and we are ultimately here to tell a story, but you can see much more of the behind the scenes and the bare bones of it. It’s relatively new.
I worry sometimes that people will hear about how prolific we are and think that we just have some sort of inherited magic money tree or that we don’t have the same restrictions. We have different restrictions, everyone has their own. We will make a show for no money and we will find free rehearsal space and then put it on in a room above a pub for free and use stuff we already have and borrow things from people and just make it happen. And I think that’s why it was important for us to try and really figure out what we do. If we’re going to tell a story, do we do this as an interactive text thing? I can code by myself in my own time and it will take me a month and then we’ll be able to tell it and put it online for free and people can also engage with it for free because we’ve had no costs, so we don’t have to charge tickets prices for it and we can make it more accessible, and it’s more sustainable than getting everyone to drive to one venue at the same time. Because the carbon footprint created by audience travel can be immense.
So if we’re going to do something in person, why does this thing deserve to be in person? We’re trying to do 12 shows every year at least, you know. And so why are we going to take something up to the Edinburgh Fringe? Why are we taking this to London? We’re Nottingham based. We don’t have an audience in London per se. We didn’t go to drama school, we don’t have work colleagues, we don’t necessarily have family and friends. If we put something on in London for a night, we’re not just getting 40 of our mates to come along to sell out. We are really hitting the ground and emailing special interest groups and figuring out how we can accept we’re going to have two people there. So how do we make a show that is still great for two people? We don’t expect there to be 30 and then are disappointed.
Some of the best shows I’ve ever done have been to single audience members, because if you get one audience member, there’s a decent chance they actually do want to be there. They’re the one person who heard about it and turned up. And some of my favourite performances that we’ve ever given, have been to tiny audiences.
If there’s a big audience, for us at least, because we make very weird work sometimes, chances are somewhere in the marketing chain somebody told a white lie and now there’s a bunch of people here expecting one thing, but it’s not quite what we’ve had before. In that particular instance, in my head, I’m thinking if they’d have stayed past the first five minutes, then perhaps, we’ve done okay. We had one Edinburgh show, which was a drag gig theatre thing and we put some tickets in the half price hut and I think maybe they overemphasised the drag element and not quite the kind of politically charged punk gig theatre element.
So we had some shows where we had one audience member. We had that twice in Edinburgh Fringe run, both times best shows, the audience really loved it. And then one time we had 40 people and after the first song, 20 people got up and left. They had to walk across the stage to leave. But you just carry on. And you know that if people have left, the people that stayed there know that they could have left. And then you can kind of work with them. Build into it.
Voidspace:
What specifically interactive works have you made?
Joe Strickland:
The show that we’ve done, that has done the best, is a gig theatre show. I’ve referenced it a couple of times so far. It’s called 24, 23, 22. It’s just two performers on stage, handheld microphones, chatting to the audience and jumping into character as and when it’s their turn. And then me on stage at the back doing sampling and music. That show started as an Arts Council funded Lockdown online performance, where the audience could cast their own show and then watch one story play out on their laptop and another story play out on their phone. And it was synchronised. So when a character stopped on your laptop, the character started on your phone and then there was a midway point where they bumped into each other and then they kind of changed over. And one story is going forwards in time and the other is going backwards.
iIt started as a digital online thing and then six months later, we got it on its feet for a one-off live performance in Nottingham. And we had loads of technical bugs, but we played through it and it was great. And then we revived that and we did that at the Omnibus Theatre, in Clapham. That was at the last minute. And we got five star reviews and we got nominated for an Off West End Award for Best Director. We then brought that to Liverpool and to Nottingham, and then we did a spring mini-tour, the next year. Then we took it to Edinburgh, as well. And that’s when it got nominated for the Popcorn Young Writing Award and we got more five star reviews.
It was good because it started as this weird little digital thing that had kind of too many extra caveats. You have to pick your own cast and you’ve got to get all your devices and you’ve got to figure it all out. It was also an adaptation of a digital thing onto stage, which was cool because we were like, this is gig theatre and it does actually kind of belong here and we can do it, so let’s do it.
But also it was a way where we showed that we could still do the work on a show for three years and then present it to people. But we’re just showing you the work in progresses all the time. We’re just not ashamed that the work is in progress. Out take is: this is a performance and it’s worth coming to, so just come along to this version. We’re going to do it for one night.
When we did the Omnibus run in London, we rehearsed it in the tech run for one day and then we ran it for three weeks. When we’ve done the tours, we’ve rehearsed it for half a day to get it back in shape. In Edinburgh, we did a day of rehearsal and then ran it for the month. And so I think also, sometimes, it’s also from logistical perspectives, people’s schedules, us not having a lot of money. We want to pay the actors fairly for their time, so maybe we can’t rehearse it for more than a day or two. But if you cast it right, if you get the performers that are confident in what you’re doing, if you make an incredibly accessible, streamlined process, so you can kind of do some online rehearsals and you can talk people through stuff and you can have rehearsal tracks, and give everyone the music in advance.
We always try and find ways to work smart and not work hard, because we’ve got lots of stuff to make, so we can’t make one thing take too much time or too many resources. And so we just keep going. And now we’ve got that show recorded and we have it as a concept album. We’ve not released it yet, but we have all of the parts. So that’s going to come up at some point soon. And then if there are opportunities to do that show again in the future, we will keep doing that. But that’s a very kind of traditional, theatery thing almost.
Another interactive one, playable one we did was a show called All Falls Down, which again started as a small show. The premise is that everyone in the audience is playing a group of friends who survive a small plane crash in the Pacific northwest in the U.S. and then you’re stranded in dense forest and there’s some sort of threat and you have to try and find one of your friends who’s gone missing, escape the forest and survive whatever the threat may be. But we use the dread system, so we have a Jenga Tower on stage and whenever the audience or character has to do something under duress or under stress or outside of their skill set, they have to pull a block from the Jenga tower. And if the tower falls over, something terrible happens. So you’ve got the audience playing Jenga and you have all these other things happening. We did that, I think, as like a trial run show, actually.
We performed that in the Crypt, the Parabolic venue in Bethnal Green, for a week and then we did that up in Nottingham and then we did that at the Vault Festival in the Shipping Container venue. And then we’ve kind of continued to do bits and bobs. But not only that, that style of interaction we found really fulfilling.
And I like small audiences. If they want to be passive, I’m mainly telling a story and getting them to do things. And if they really want to be active, they can really be active. And also, every time we’ve done that show, it’s been a different threat. It’s not the same monster. Every single performance has had a different monster or a different creature. So then we’ve since then taken that structure of a show and we’ve done a few other different ones that have used maybe not a Jenga Tower, but a Magic 8 ball. And it’s sort of very similar to a tabletop thing, but you can play it. You can go from having never played one to having finished playing one in one hour.
So from a sort of a sustainability perspective, it always feels really right.
Voidspace:
Tell me a bit more about sustainability in your work.
Imagine we were going to stage The Importance of Being Earnest, or something. Are we going to spend six figures rebuilding a drawing room on stage in the West End or say, well, why don’t you just do this in a drawing room? Just do a site specific thing. Because then you can. It’s going to be as easy for people to get to as it is to get to the West End for a lot of the audience. You just find a venue and do it.
I say this from some of our earliest work being site specific work in museums and rooms above pubs. But we did that because I wanted to do a show in a really cool aesthetic location, but we didn’t have any money, so we couldn’t build that, so we had to go somewhere that already has that aesthetic, hire that space and perform it in there. It makes much more sense.
I don’t drive. So if we want to do a tour, I have to be able to put it in a rucksack or a suitcase and take it on the train or pop it into a coach. So we make very lo-fi shows that can fit into a rucksack. Because it logistically made sense from a resources perspective. But a good side effect of all of that is that it’s more environmentally friendly, it’s more sustainable. If we buy a piece of equipment for a show, we make sure we have other uses for it afterwards. So sure we’ve got a projector and we have some handheld mics and stuff, but we use those all the time and we then also experiment with them. We make sure that if we’re buying stuff, it’s not brand new if it doesn’t have to be and we really get everything we can out of it. It’s easier for us because if you’re doing one show every three years, and you’re touring that show for three years, you’re getting a lot of work out of that equipment that you’re buying. So it still kind of comes around.
But I think the main thing was the report from Creation Theatre out of Oxford that came out over lockdown, which showed that something like 90 or 95% of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with theatre was people travelling to venues to see work. And it was sort of a no brainer that if we wanted to make work more sustainably, which I think everyone does actually have to think about, then we should be making more digital work, even using cloud storage and even using, I don’t know, AI as an assistant or to help you write a funding bid or something. Even with interaction with data centres and rendering video and creating virtual worlds and stuff in Unity or whatever, it’s still way more sustainable to make a digital work. Because otherwise, as a producer, if you’re stressed and in person, you’re going to be buying costume off of Wish and Temu and AliExpress and you’re going to be buying wood to build sets from God knows where. And at the end of it, you either have to get rid of it or find someone else to hand it off to.
But there are problems in theatre with set designers and copyright. So a lot of sets, even though people are quite happy for it to be reused, end up not being reused. In theatre, we should reuse our set designs more. I think part of it, really, the problem is that making theatre is so financially insecure, people are forced to try and really think about every way that they can make a living from everything that they do. And so the idea of, if you want to reuse these walls I built for this production, I need some sort of licensing deal or I need some sort of payment after the fact, and it ends up not making sense economically. We’re just not playing that game and we’ll do digital stuff. And theatre is about suspending your disbelief as well. Anyway, so I think building a massive set sometimes goes against a lot of the ideas that your audience are already primed to do. You can just be in a black box space or a shipping container or the room above a pub, or something, and you can just say, just imagine that we’re in ancient Rome and the audience go, oh, okay. And they will.
Voidspace:
I know that something else you are passionate about is access in your work, and in immersive & interactive in general. Tell me more about that.
Joe Strickland:
I identify as disabled and neurodivergent and I’ve done a lot of work in disability arts and I think the way that we ran Chronic Insanity, we didn’t intend it necessarily to be a disability arts organisation and we don’t, like publicly defined that way, because we don’t want to artificially limit ourselves. We found that by just saying that we did digital theatre quite strongly, but we are absolutely disabled run, and neurodivergent run. And a lot of the people, the associate artists, the people we work with over and over again identify those ways as well. And I think because we work so differently to the way that a lot of the industry works and is not accessible and is incredibly ableist because no one tries to be anything else.
And ableism is just the default if you don’t put in any effort. And it just becomes that, well, we try and be flexible because we’re doing something that is like, objectively, a ridiculous aim. We do so in a way that is sustainable, like I said, and isn’t going to burn people out and we’re not going to burn through our collaborators and they’re going to have a terrible time and never want to work with us again, because that’s not going to be a sustainable way to make work. And it’s also not a nice way to do it either. So if we’re going to make a new thing, we want it to not have the old problems and we’re going to just sort of come up with the best way of doing it. And that’s attracted a lot of neurodivergent people and people with chronic illnesses and people who like a different way of doing things, or are desperate for a different way of doing things. And then through doing that, I started doing more and more disability arts projects and working with other organisations and really understanding what access was required. And it also can be easier to do that digitally rather than in person.
And then started realising that there were people, especially during lockdown, people started understanding access a bit more because technically we all needed it, we all had to work remotely, by and large, at least in the entertainment industry. So the idea of access started being much more pertinent to lots of people, and people were more interested in taking it on board. And it was a place where I guess also as an income generation for the organisation, our general business model is that we get public funding and we put on weird experimental work, but we learn a lot from that. And then we use those learnings and consult for other organisations for access or for creative tech in order to generate more income to then keep making weird experimental work.
And as long as you have enough public funding to begin with, that cycle can kind of self perpetuate. And then if you keep seeding it with an Arts Council bid here and some Innovate UK funding there, and other bits and bobs along the way, that helps keep it alive and keep it going.
But I think also it’s very easy to actually make your work accessible. You know, you can put captions in a PowerPoint and put it up on a TV screen. We’ve done that for shows. It works really nicely and is very simple. And you just press a space bar as long as you’re doing the lights and the sound. Audio description, again, is a thing you can do very simply and easily. You can build it into your shows. Audio description can be sound effects. It can be, if you’re going to open a door, make it sound really like a door. So if people can’t see what you’re doing, they can hear what you’re doing. It doesn’t have to be complicated. And the best time to build it in is right at the beginning as well. Like the number of times you come onto a project in the last week, and they’re like, we need to make this accessible. And you’re like, well, then you should have done that at the beginning. But because I keep suggesting things and then they don’t want to do it, because it messes with something.
It’s a problem with immersive, I think, because sometimes, particularly in the bigger budget shows, aesthetic is key and the experience can be key. So let’s say you’re doing an immersive Titanic thing. How do you do captions? They don’t. You don’t have the technology for it, technically. You could do audio description through radios and stuff. How do you do captions? Well, maybe you just have screens. You could probably have crt. It’s not too far off. You can have screens and stuff. You could just project it in a way that feels like lighting design. So it’s sort of ethereal, like light dancing off of the waves and onto the ship. Like, there are ways to do it. Or you go, this isn’t to be aesthetic, this is access. If you want to talk about the Equalities Act, this is actually something that you technically kind of legally should provide and have to do. Sign language is a recognised language. It’s a national language of the UK that’s codified by law. And there’s an argument to say no one’s tried this legally yet, that if you’re a publicly funded institute, you should always be providing British Sign language interpretation for any publicly funded work that you’re doing. No one’s gone down that route yet.
It’s not difficult to do captions. You could just do captions. I’ve been to some immersive shows and some theatre shows where they have screens and stuff in the shows or they make you walk around with your phone and it could have captions. It’s also nowadays that AI generated speech to text works really well. And even with bad quality microphones, even with regional accents, it’s more accurate than not having any access.
And then we’re coming back down to a perfectionist point, which is if theatre and a lot of immersive work is, if it’s made by a perfectionist they want perfect access. And perfect access doesn’t exist because it will always be inaccessible to somebody. So there are people that want to make their work accessible but are perfectionists and end up not doing any access because they can’t make perfect access. You should just do something and then communicate that to your audience. If you say this show is captioned but you’re doing an experimental captioning thing and it only works half the time, then you know, the audience are not informed and they are disappointed. Their expectations have not been set.
But if you say, hey, we have two options for you. A non-aesthetic captioning that works 100% of the time, or an aesthetic captioning which might break down when you arrive, you let us know and we will give you the option of which one you want to use, then you can just do that. You can offer someone a worse version of a thing. The worst they’re going to do is say no or not book to see your thing. But tricking someone by saying that it’s accessible by saying it’s step free, but technically there’s a two centimetre lip to go into a really key area and you didn’t think that would be a problem, but for some people it is. For some wheelchairs or for some people with mobility issues, they actually can’t do that. And now your thing isn’t step free and they’re locked out of a thing.
You have to make mistakes. I can come into your production, I can tell you what the problems are, but you’re going to not be able to follow it all and you’re not going to really take it on board properly and internally without making things accidentally inaccessible to people, feeling awful at that and making sure you do it better next time. But that’s just how we learn. Biologically, you can’t learn without making mistakes. You have to. So you’re going to have to. Again, maybe it’s easier. Having done 100 shows, you make a lot of mistakes and you learn from them quite quickly.
Voidspace:
What are your plans for 2025? It’s going to be a big year for you, by the looks of it.
Joe Strickland:
We are doing a residency at the Omnibus Theatre in Clapham in January at the start of 2025. We are doing 15 shows in two weeks. That’s 10 in-person shows, a different one every evening, and then five online shows from our archive of digital work. The shows are a mixture of audience favourites and company favourites. On our end, they are shows we’ve done over and over again, but we haven’t presented in London before, or for a while.
Then there are some rare shows that we did once, many years ago and have been looking for a chance to bring back. And then we also have some rehearsed readings and some shows from companies that we support as well, and we’re either bringing them to London for the first time or to help do a rehearsed reading for a show that we hope to do more of in the future. So there’s a big mix of stuff, and a third of the shows are also available online. If you can’t get to Clapham, if you’re not London-based or if it’s not accessible or if you can’t do that, like if you have young children or if you’re just tired after work or whatever it is, those shows are on demand and are available for the whole run of the residency, which is from the 13th to the 25th January.
I think on the spectrum of interactivity, there’s a whole bunch of different stuff. Of those first week shows we have at least three fully interactive, fully playable pieces. One is All Falls Down, the plane crash show that I was talking about earlier. Another is called Andy’s Coming, which uses the Magic 8 ball. And it’s sort of a Toy Story meets Kill Bill show where Andy drops his toys off at the charity shop and they want revenge and they walk through the high street back to Andy’s university dorm room to confront him.
Another one is called Imprisoned with the Pharaohs, which is based on the Houdini/Lovecraft collaboration. But you awake in the middle of a kind of a labyrinth. There’s a Jenga tower and a pile of sand which becomes a makeshift hourglass to help you remember how you got there and survive the sort of Lovecraftian mind-melting horrors that lie in this tomb under the desert sands.
Voidspace:
That’s a lot of horror-inflected work…
Joe Strickland:
I do like horror as a genre and it doesn’t make any sense for there to not be more horror theatre. All of the benefits of horror would work in theatre. When horror theatre does work, it works really well. The Woman in Black ran for 20 years solid.
Producers should be making more horror plays because it makes sense. Because audiences, horror audiences, if you want to be capitalist about it, horror audiences mobilise and don’t care about who’s written it or who’s in it. They just want to come see a cool thing and the live experience of it actually is a thing that people really enjoy. And if you want to take that hat off and just put on a creative hat, then in the live environment you can use infrasound and you can change temperatures and use smells and make something incredibly evocative and really create horror for your audience in a way that you can’t do as effectively depending on your method through screen or through the video game or through purely audio. You know that WhatsApp play we’ve been talking about is a horror play and we made people genuinely terrified from just timed messages on the screen. It’s the perfect embodiment of imagining things in the dark spaces and suspending your disbelief. It’s all of the benefits of theatre. But theatres aren’t run by people that like horror, so they don’t commission it.
Voidspace:
What advice do you have for aspiring creators in your field?
Joe Strickland:
You just have to make stuff. You can just make it by yourself. You can perform it to one other person. That still counts. That still counts as a play. It doesn’t matter where it is. It doesn’t matter. Do it in the street, do more street performance. Then your audiences just walk past. You don’t have to put any effort into getting people to come to where you’re doing stuff. You’re going to where the people are. You don’t have to play the game of the industry. It’s broken beyond belief.
Drama schools train too many people and then no one provides enough opportunities for them. But then we don’t accept that doing it on an amateur scale counts as doing it. We say that people have to invest a huge amount of resources into becoming more and more skilled and high quality work is actually just work with lots of resources, and resources mean privilege. The ability to spend lots of time becoming a prima ballerina or the ability to spend lots of money making sculptures or big paintings until your big paintings are good enough.
But then also theatre’s not actually a meritocracy and loads of its nepotism and loads of it’s who you know. You could spend 50 years crafting the perfect play and then no one would care about it or be bothered to see it. So it’s just massively broken. You can either wait for there to be an opening in the weird Total Wipeout style obstacle course that the industry is that you can jump through and manage to survive the big red balls, and get your way into having a career . And then God knows what happens.
And then sometimes some people emerge as a late-career theatre maker. Or you can just be like, I’m not going to do that I’m going to do my own thing. We sort of run like an artist’s studio. I like the idea of a biennial. You go and see an artist do a biennial, all the work they’ve made over the past two years and there’s like hundreds of pieces.
But theatre companies, it wouldn’t be uncommon for them to have made one show in a year. And I’ve got more stories I want to tell. And you’ll always be able to come up with stories. I was worried that my creativity would dry up in my late 20s. Didn’t happen. Got more creative and worked with more people and then had the opportunity to put their ideas on stage and centre their stories and their voices. So try and find people that share the same values as you and work with them. Make work flexibly and make work that fits into the spaces you have. So if you want to make massive, huge plays, that’s great. You can wait 10 or 20 years and you can do them, when people will give you that space and give you that time and those resources. But if you try and do that first, then it’s like a moonshot. It’s a Hail Mary and that’s too much gambling for me. Figure out what your core values are and then make that work.
And my values: I wanted to spend most of my time being an artist. And so I figured out a way to do it, and the way I do it isn’t going to be perfect for everybody, but everyone will probably have a perfect way of doing it. And digital stuff lets you do that much more in the time you have, or on the resources you have, the budgets you have, the opportunities that you have, and then to find very bespoke, specific audiences, if the work you want to make is very bespoke and specific, or give you a broad audience, if you can make something that lots of people will enjoy. It just helps make everything more efficient and facilitates everything much more easily. And you can learn it much faster than you think you will. If you’re listening to this and you’re not very technically minded, YouTube is full of people who are the best in their field just teaching you how to do stuff for free. Whether that’s coding or game design or video editing or sound editing, you’ll be able to make a thing and make those first things first, because they’re going to be like the first pancake. They’re going to be bad. And that’s cool, because you have to make the bad things.
I think there’s a Victor Hugo quote about how every pen has 20,000 terrible words in it that you have to get out before you can start getting to the good ones. You have to make stuff before you can make the good stuff. And if you wait, you’ll only ever just be delaying making the bad stuff. Make loads of bad stuff and then start making good stuff, because you’ve made all the bad stuff and all that’s left is the good. So just make loads of things.
Chronic Insanity’s residency at the Clapham Omnibus Theatre runs from 14 January to 22 January 2025, in person and online