“We lost something when we put the audience in the dark and separated them from the actors and put the actors illuminated on the stage. We lost something when we separated out the audience and actors, and it’s something that people are hungry for now.
If you look at immersive, people love it. They are eating it up, because there is something primal about that need to be sharing the space and air and light and energy directly with the performer. We need them, they need us.”
For Emily Carding, whose interactive Richard III (a one-person show) was one of the highlights of Voidspace Live 2024, interactive theatre is the natural successor to the vitality of the Early Modern stage.
We welcome them into the Voidspace to talk about their interactive takes on Shakespeare, the unique joys and challenges of performing in 24-hour show Key of Dreams, and how a theatre audience may have more in common with the Borg than one might think.
Voidspace:
Emily, welcome to the Voidspace. It’s great to have you here. I would love to invite you to enter this imaginary, lightly haunted attic and to pull up an imaginary bean bag and have an imaginary cup of tea and settle yourself.
Is there room for me in here? It feels a little crowded.
Emily Carding:
It’s all the spectres.
Voidspace:
The Voidspace is quite an interesting, Tardis-like entity. It always feels cosy, and yet there is room for everyone.
Emily Carding:
Lovely. Thank you very much.
Voidspace:
Thank you for joining us today. I’m really excited to talk to you. Just to start off, I’d love it if you could tell us who you are and what you do in this interactive space.
Emily Carding:
I’m Emily Carding. I suppose the thing I’m best known for is my interactive solo Richard III, called Richard III: A One Person Show. Which I’ve made for the company called Brite Theatre, which is basically me and my director, Kolbrun Bjort Sigfusdottir .
We made this show nearly 10 years ago now. I also perform a solo Hamlet, called Hamlet: An Experience.
Both of these shows work in a similar way in that I play the main character, and then the audience plays the other characters in it.
Richard III is very much me manipulating people and puppeteering them. In Hamlet, the audience have a bit more agency. But those are the two interactive things that I’m best known for.
I’m also an actor in immersive experiences: The Locksmith’s Dream and Key of Dreams, and I’ve also done some films and bits and bobs of other things.
Voidspace:
Lovely. Let’s start with the Shakespeare.
I’ve obviously seen your Richard III, and quite a few of my readers will have done because it was at Voidspace Live back in June ’24. It was very exciting.
When you say about puppeteering people, you give people names, you give them labels, you are addressing them, in your role as Richard, and incorporating them into the story in that way.
What was it that drew you to reconfiguring your relationship with the audience in this way for a classic text?
Emily Carding:
What’s great about Shakespeare is that it’s written in such a way that, if you think back to the early modern theatres – with shared light – and the quite immersive nature of those spaces compared to modern theatre, it lends itself naturally to taking this postmodern perspective on it.
Richard III is a play that breaks that fourth wall in a way that’s particularly useful to us. It lent itself to it very, very naturally, when you take out most of the other character’s concerns and stories. Because let’s face it, none of them are particularly interesting compared to Richard.
When you focus just on Richard’s story, and he is constantly not only talking to the other characters and manipulating them, and making them complicit in his actions, he’s talking to the audience right from the beginning. He has an opening monologue, where he says, “Hey, this is who I am. This is what has happened. This is what is happening. This is what I’m going to do. Stick with me, kids. It’s going to be a lot of fun.”
You didn’t have to do too much work to that to make it work in this interactive way. The idea was originally born from the previous show that Kolbrun and I had made while we were both doing a postgrad at Exeter University in staging Shakespeare, which really encouraged this thinking, because it gave us the resources to make work.
I’m very much counting talented people amongst all those resources – and space and time, all these wonderful things that you have when you’re doing training. But that course, it wasn’t an acting course. What it was, was just looking at different approaches to Shakespeare through history and now, and encouraging creativity, and basically encouraging fucking with Shakespeare. So that was really the cauldron that this magical thing emerged from. It was a module on mashups, actually, that started it for Kolbrun and I. I’d mashed up The Tempest and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.
Voidspace:
I bet that was an interesting combination.
Emily Carding:
We each had to write just one scene. In my scene, I had Ariel dragging Prospero off to hell for his crimes against the spirits of the land. It was juicy.
Kolbrun had written a scene which was Juliet and Ophelia, basically in purgatory for having both committed suicide: a mashup from both those plays. We were using Shakespeare’s dialogue, and recontextualising it, and making something new.
We each looked at what the other had written. We’d both set these things in hell. And we said, “There’s a show in this!”
We brought these two scenes together and created a whole show from that point on, which was a mashup of most of Shakespeare’s plays and Dante’s Inferno. And that little bit of Faustus that I had put in there already. This is a show that we really want to revive sometime. If anybody ever wants to give us some money.
Ariel took the audience on a journey through the circles of hell. It wasn’t an interactive show: it was promenade. We took over whole spaces, made it very site-specific, to fit whatever space we were in, and adapted very quickly to those different spaces.
For example, we took over the entirety of the Northcott Theatre, but had the audience on stage with us and would take them through. So, it was quite immersive, but not necessarily interactive.
The audience would be sat around the table in the circle of hell for gluttony, and there would be Titus and Falstaff in there together. In the circle for the violent, there was Henry IV, played by the lovely Bryony Reynolds, and Richard III, whom I played.
There’s this one scene where I played Richard, and – because of the nature of this play, and the fact that you’re moving through all these different characters very quickly in all these different scenes – it was very much a caricatured version of that character. Nevertheless, I just instantly felt a connection with this character – the juice and the humour of it, the fun of it. And I said to Kolbrun at that point, “I really want to play Richard properly. He’s really talking to me. He won’t leave me alone.” And I think I’d separately said “I really want to do a one person show, just as my next challenge, I want to challenge myself.”
So we came up with the idea of doing a solo Richard III. And we quickly realised that the only way it would work is if we made the audience the other characters.” So we did, but we didn’t know if it would work. Kolbrun managed to sort us out a residency at a theatre in Reykjavik, where we went for two weeks with two hours’ worth of text, and the space to play, not knowing whether we would have something that worked or not.
We had an open rehearsal process, an open studio, where people could come and be audience members for us to try stuff on. We arrived there thinking “Let’s give it a go”. I think after day one or two we realised, “This is going to work. It’s going to be good.”
Voidspace:
No, this is great. It’s really interesting.
Emily Carding:
We did a work in progress performance at the end of that time, for an Icelandic audience. From the beginning, it’s been internationally friendly despite being a very text-heavy show. Somehow, because of the way that it’s communicated directly to and with an audience, it’s conversational. Even if there’s a language gap, it somehow still comes across.
That comes directly out of the original early modern mode of performance: to talk directly to the audience.
Voidspace:
That line of continuity is fascinating. Look at how popular The Globe is, now.
Emily Carding:
And there is some sneering about that as being, “Oh, it’s just a historical reconstruction. Oh, it’s just a tourist trap, whatever.”
No, it was a fantastic experiment, because we lost something when we put the audience in the dark and separated them from the actors and put the actors illuminated on the stage.
We lost something when we separated out the audience and actors, and it’s something that people are hungry for now. If you look at immersive, people love it. They are eating it up, because there is something primal about that need to be sharing the space and air and light and energy directly with the performer. We need them, they need us.
It’s a real symbiotic connection. To go back to early modern and say, “Hey, what did we lose? And what can we do with that now through a postmodern lens, knowing what we know now and being bold enough to experiment with form, what new thing can evolve from this?”
I think that’s tremendously exciting. If people are sneering at that, they can stick it up their arses, quite frankly.
Voidspace:
I think there are two parts to that.
There’s the fact that there is the reinvigoration of this connection, which was lost when we lost shared light.
But then you also say, viewing it through a postmodern lens: we’re not just going back in time, because I suppose that innocence has been lost. Or we know at least that our dominant theatrical form has become so different that there is a difference in energy. Because of what’s happened in the middle.
Emily Carding:
Well, yes. Society has shifted and people have changed and etiquettes have changed.
It would be very difficult for us as performers now if we were to go on stage at The Globe, for example, and be heckled and have things thrown at us in the manner of the time.
It’d be very difficult to go up there and do a Shakespeare play in the manner of which they do perform at The Globe. They might have a little bit of banter with the audience, but the audience is going to be very shy of doing anything back.
But you do a piece of immersive theatre, where it’s established from the beginning that you’re reaching out that hand and you’re making that eye contact and you’re asking the question, and saying “I’m waiting for a response.”
In Richard III, for example, I think the Voidspace audience was surprisingly well behaved – perhaps because they hadn’t been drinking: I do a lot of pub theatres. And I tell you what, it’s different when you get an audience, especially an audience with groups of people who know each other, and they’ve had a couple of glasses of wine, and they’re bringing their wine in with them.
I’ve had some boisterous shows that felt a lot like Shakespeare meets stand-up, and it’s been a hell of a lot of fun. And that’s part of what our process prepared me for.
We did so much character work, so much work that you don’t see, that Kolbrun did with me on that show, to build that character from the inside out, running through everything that actually happens in the play that you don’t necessarily see, to the life before the play, the relationships with all those characters. So that character is solid.
You put me in that situation, and I don’t want to jinx this, but I’ve been doing this show for nearly 10 years now. Audiences do some weird shit, and they should absolutely have permission to do that. It’s my job to deal with that, give them something entertaining back, and keep the show on track.
Voidspace:
To keep that core of character, that’s what I’m getting from what you’re saying. The strength of that core.
Emily Carding:
The character is what deals with all of this for me. The character has been so built – and this is why Richard III, again, lends itself particularly well to this format, is that he is witty and he’s powerful and he’s clever and he’s smart and he’s manipulative and he’s going to come on top of any situation that happens.
He’s not going to be able to lose, so he’ll charm his way through it, or intimidate; whatever he needs to do. Once we’ve started, wherever that roller coaster is going to take me on that night or that afternoon, it’s just that Richard will deal with whatever comes.
Voidspace:
I love that. I think that’s actually a really nice little nugget of insight for performers in this space, generally, actually, of how to build up those layers I don’t know what you’d call it, immersion in character, to be able to deal with the fluidity and fickleness of audiences. Because I know you’ve done work all over the world, particularly Richard III. We’ve had conversations where you’ve talked about some of the bizarre situations where you’ve run the show. I’d be really interested in anything of interest about that journey and that variety.
Emily Carding:
The weirdest, I think, the weirdest location, the weirdest circumstances under which I performed this play was…
I was performing it in a proper… I think I was on at The Lion and Unicorn or somewhere in London. And while I was in London, I was booked by a hospital or a company that worked within a hospital providing entertainment, to go and do a gig in the afternoon in this hospital.
And I presumed, foolishly, it would be in a room where people would come especially to see that show. And I was wrong.
It was the corner where two corridors in this working hospital met, and there was a piano there and a microphone, and I think normally, they must just have some musical entertainment there.
For some reason, I didn’t see this. They approached us and booked me for this. So, I’m in this hospital in a corridor, basically. And you know the nature of the show is people come in and I give them a character, and people were coming and going. And there was this one woman who I was told not to interact with who was just waiting for me to leave so she could go on the piano.
People are coming and going, and I do not have a consistent audience.
And, of course, in an environment where some people are dealing with the hardest day of their life, and really aren’t in the mood for murder, infanticide, and all the rest of the deaths in that show.
Voidspace:
I think if you can deal with that, you can deal with anything.
Emily Carding:
From that to an amazing, full 300-seater theatre in Pakistan, where it’s so packed that people are sitting on the steps.
And I didn’t know how it was going to go down in Karachi, in Pakistan.
I thought: “Surely they are going to be a bit averse to any unusual gender stuff? How are they going to react to this?”
They loved it. I got one of the best reviews from Dawn, the newspaper in Pakistan. I had an amazing response there.
I think one of my favourite venues was when I took it to a festival in Romania, where I’ve been a few times now, called Babelfest in Târgoviste.
In my defence, I don’t think they had sent me this particular information, but I just looked at the festival, it’s like, “okay, I’ll be on in such a theatre, I’ll turn up and somebody will drive me to Târgoviste and show me to my hotel, and I don’t need to know any other details.”
I presumed I was on in the theatre. And then I remember turning up to run the show, to tech it. And they were like, “oh no, you’re not in the theatre. You’re in the ruins.”
I’m like, “What? I don’t remember the ruins. What ruins? It’s not an outdoor show.”
I remember the ruins. They were ruins of Vlad Tepes’ Stronghold down the road. Dracula’s Castle.
Voidspace:
It’s interesting to hear about the range of spaces you’ve played, because so much interactive work requires a specific set of parameters when it comes to performance.
I’d love to see more work that is stripped down enough not to have to rely on elaborate set dressing, not to have to rely on the specificity; a show that can just expose that core and be done anywhere.
Emily Carding:
It’s partially borne from necessity, but we wouldn’t do it any other way because very early on, we’ve had a couple of people offer to help but develop this with more tech and set etc. But I’ve always refused.
Because part of it is this punk aesthetic. If I just rock up with a chair and a table, I can basically do this show anywhere. Maybe it will be in a small room with a dozen people, or maybe it will be in a proper theatre with 300 people.
I think what it really boils down to is the true immersiveness – not promenade, because I think a lot of things that call themselves immersive theatre are just very well-dressed promenade – true immersion is when there is an invitation between the actor or the character. You get to actually join me in this world, and we’ll make this world together. We’re in this world together. You’re here with me.
It’s gorgeous when you have it, but it doesn’t need the beautiful setting and everything else at all. I feel very lucky that I have this show that packs up into a case. I can borrow a chair wherever I go and give people an experience. My experience around the world has been that people haven’t had anything like this before.
Voidspace:
There were at least 50 of us, at Voidspace Live, which I think was the biggest audience that a show had that day. Not every show was really made to fill that space. What really impressed me was that by drawing in those few representatives from the audience very directly, and then by throwing your eye contact and scattering your attention around fairly liberally, you managed to make everyone in that room feel part of it, even those who weren’t actually standing up and getting ‘dead’ stickers put on them.
Emily Carding:
That is one of the things that comes from the early modern practice, again.
On our post-grad course at Exeter, we did two residencies at Shakespeare’s Globe and learned all of the techniques of working that space. So much of this comes from Globe technique.
One of the things I learned there, which I think is so important to all Shakespeare performers, whether you are working in an immersive way or not, is that if you make proper, consistent eye contact with one person in that audience and talk with them and give them a full chunk of text, and really engage with that person before you flit about or move on to anybody else – if you make intense and real energetic contact with that person – everybody else feels as though they’re involved, because you’ve made connection with the audience.
Because an audience, when they’re in that space, form a hive mind – or certainly an empathically connected consciousness. People’s heartbeats all start to beat in the same rhythm. Anybody who’s performed knows that audiences consist of a great deal of individuals, but they have their own energy.
They are the audience. If you make real contact with one of them, you’ll get the rest of them. Then maybe you move your conduit then to somebody else.
In the context of Shakespeare, it might go with the thought “In this bit, I’m talking to my conscience, and now I’m going to talk to my wicked side here. Maybe I’ll go back to my conscience, depending on where the thought takes me.”
This gets into really complex Shakespearean performance stuff. But in terms of immersion, you see my point.
Voidspace:
Absolutely. The audience is basically the Borg.
Emily Carding:
For the span of that performance.
Voidspace:
I think it’s something that goes quite a way to productively bridging some of the gaps between what people see as traditional theatre practice, and what people see as something very specific and different in immersive and interactive theatre.
I think that the more cross-pollination and common understanding there can be in those things, the better.
How is the role of the audience different in your Hamlet?
Emily Carding:
This was a later development. Obviously, we had that idea that we developed in Richard, and I’d got quite confident in that.
Hamlet was my idea because Kolbrun is not keen on Hamlet as a character. She finds him to be a bit of a dickhead. That one was left up to me, initially, to come up with the draft: Hamlet as a character. Again, this is all very character-based. We give people an experience of that character in that space.
Hamlet works in a very different way as a character and as a play, because in Richard III, Richard moves all the action along himself. Hamlet does not do that; he does reflect and talk with the audience a great deal, and philosophise with the audience, but he doesn’t move the action on at all.
There’s an extra level of meta in Hamlet as an experience. As you, the audience, are arriving in that space, I am in the space as Hamlet already, and you are the players arriving at Elsinore.
This time you actually get given a cue script. So Hamlet, in a in a director mode initially, will ask you – and it’s very consensual – “Would you do me the honour, please, of playing this role?”
And he asks you to play the roles in his life, of course, from the play. So, “would you do me the honour of playing Claudius, who’s now the king of Denmark, my uncle?” Give you a little bit of backstory. Make sure that you have time to look through your script.
So, it starts with Hamlet’s advice to the players. It’s a little bit deconstructed. Once everybody’s had a chance to get comfortable with that, there’s even a little bit of minor stage combat with Laertes, which is practised beforehand and mapped out.
There’s maybe a good 10 minutes of this one hour Hamlet which is spent making you comfortable and creating a safe space, so that all this gathered troupe of players that we are now creating in that moment are going to trust each other, and know that everybody’s going to be respectful of each other. There’s not going to be any mocking or laughing in a mean spirit at anybody.
We are making this story together. The cue scripts mean you know what you’re doing, you can see the few words coming up to it, anything you might have to say. There’s not a great deal, but it’s enough to make you feel like you’ve got something juicy. You might have certain actions, and there are certain improv moments.
The audience has a great deal more agency. They have some scope for creative interpretation of certain actions within that. It’s my job, as Hamlet – and other people’s, the audience’s job – to respond to each other. You only know what you’re doing, you don’t necessarily know what anybody else is going to do.
Voidspace:
That’s an early modern practice, isn’t it? That’s how scripts used to be.
Emily Carding:
Exactly. Again, this has come from an early modern version of how the actors used to work. They would have their own lines and the cues, no rehearsals, really. They would learn that.
Any fights that would need to be rehearsed would obviously be practised. Safety. It’s giving people not only an experience of the character of Hamlet and being in a very intimate relationship with that character, becoming loved ones, family, enemies, friends, but it’s also giving you an experience of some Shakespearean theatrical practise in the context of being a Shakespearean player.
Although, again, it’s a modernish setting. The setting is very much just like a rehearsal room. In this one, it’s not me in the centre and you around the outside. The ideal setting -again, it’s adaptable because it’s obviously been in theatres and smaller spaces – but the ideal setting for this is just a circle of chairs, and I’m just in one of those chairs with you.
Then there’s the space in the middle, and we all use that as the playing space. But ‘To be or not to be’, for example, I’m just going to be sat on one of those chairs in the circle with all of you, just chatting.
I love it for that. It takes all of the grandiose tendencies out of it. It is structured around the main soliloquies, most of them, so you pretty much get the bits that you know. There’s certain bits missing, but you get the bits that you need for the story of Hamlet, all in an hour, and you make that version.
It’s completely unique each time.
Voidspace:
What I love about that is that – I’m sure quite deliberately – the mode of interaction is influenced by the play. If Richard is your suave, charming manipulator who is completely on it, Hamlet is very much going to be more comfortable in the circle of chairs, letting everyone else have a bit of a think as well.
Emily Carding:
It’s defined by the action itself: Hamlet is defined by his lack of action. Exactly.
There are times in that show where I’ve been very much standing peripherally, watching people do things, and I’m not… God, there are some beautiful moments which I won’t spoil you for. There’s a great deal of scope for different interpretations of this particular action that you might be given. And so often it was so beautiful that I would just be just there crying as Hamlet, watching somebody else work for a good chunk of time.
I loved that. And the last moment, I’m not even on stage. The last moment is taken by one of the players.
Voidspace:
Something that people seem to think about a lot when they’re starting working in an immersive or interactive space, is the degree of control that you concede to your audience.
One thing that I always think is that if you create the right atmosphere from the beginning and if you do your onboarding right, then actually you can trust your audience.
That sounds like a lesson that we’re getting from the way that you do Hamlet.
Emily Carding:
Obviously we are contained within the framework of the play itself and the cue scripts reflect that. But it was a real exercise in saying “Let’s take a step back. Let’s trust the audience. Let’s see what they do: because after all, this is for them.”
Voidspace:
I love that. I’d like to ask a little bit about your work with Timon of Athens.
Emily Carding:
It’s very early stages, but I’m really interested in pushing things even further and doing something radically different.
It’s going to have a strong game mechanics element, and I won’t be playing just one character in the same way.
There’s going to be a lot more audience agency, and the whole thing is going to be a lot more deconstructed. Again, in a character-driven way, reflecting Timon’s madness and rejection of society and everything else.
That’s in the early stages of development at the moment. I’m just really proud of my title: Timon(opoly).
Because obviously, Monopoly is this horribly capitalist hellscape of a game and deals with a lot of the same issues that Timon of Athens is very scathing of.
What better way to reflect this descent into misanthropy than through a bad game and then a game show? We’re very much hoping that you’ll be able to come and meet fortune’s fool and play Timonopoly at some point next year.
Voidspace:
That sounds very exciting. You’ve also been working on the Locksmith’s Dream and on Key of Dreams at the country house in Wales, and that’s very different because it’s a 24-hour experience. It sounds like a very different way of performing as well.
Emily Carding:
I’m so delighted that I get to work on Locksmith’s Dream and Key of Dreams in particular, which has much more audience agency because, again, it comes down to character.
In Richard III and Hamlet, and whatever else, I’m married to the text there, but there’s everything around it. In Key of Dreams, yes, we’ve got the beautiful setting. But what makes it real is that the characters are real.
It’s the same process in a way, because I do the work on the character, and then I just wind that character up and let them go in-world.
I don’t ever worry about lines, which is great. There’s a lot of information, a lot of world building and info that I need to have to be aware of, obviously.
And to be really comfortable, I like to know as much as possible that my character would know because you never know what anybody’s going to ask you, what you might need to draw upon. But the beautiful moments in Key of Dreams are those dinner conversations where I’m just in character and I’m just talking to you.
You just come as yourselves, and you get to sit there, and we’ll have dinner and you just talk to me in character. That’s drawing you into that world. So all that background in character-driven stuff has prepared me really well for being in character for 24 hours and taking you all on a crazy journey into some dark places. Fantastic.
Voidspace:
Thank you. That all sounds very exciting. Is there any advice that you would give as a performer in this space, or creator in this space, to people who are at the beginning of their own journeys?
Emily Carding:
What’s the story that you want, what’s the journey that you want to take people on?
Don’t get so married to this idea that everything has to have a huge budget and be beautiful with all the dressing and everything else. Break it down to “What’s the character? What’s the story? What do you uniquely have to offer an audience? What journey can you take them on?”
Because it’s really about this transformative journey that you have the potential of taking an audience on, that is your unique gift that nobody else has. Do your thing and make it beautiful from the inside. Everything else will be made in the heart and in the mind as you get in the imagination. That’s the real gift.