“Every single time a show ends, we look up there and see what the audience wrote up, how everything connects together. It looks like a serial killer diagram with all the red pen connecting everything up.” You can see Tom Black’s eyes light up whenever he talks about what his audiences have done.
Tom is firmly of the new school of interactive theatre making. Not content with just getting audiences out of their seats, he sets the bar high: he makes interactive theatre where the audience’s actions get to make a genuine impact on the world of the show.
His work to date gives agency in spades: in Parabolic Theatre’s critically acclaimed Crisis? What Crisis?, audiences could affect the fate of 1970s UK in five very different directions – from seeing off the advent of Margaret Thatcher to pushing the country to the brink of nuclear war. Lockdown baby turned real world playground Jury Games lets players unravel a mystery by interacting with live defendants in any way they wish: the ultimate outcome will depend on the extent to which they decide to win their trust, play hardball or try something completely different.
Tom shares with us insights into the trick to maintaining audience agency while keeping a show feeling dramatically satisfying, how to manage the ordered chaos of a show where the audience is a genuine part of the action, and what tiddlywinks has to do with the downfall of a government.
voidspace:
Welcome to the voidspace. Really glad to have you here. To kick off, please tell us who you are, and what you do in the interactive arts world.
Tom Black:
I am Tom Black. I am a maker of interactive theatre. I have worked in various capacities since getting into this space. In about 2018, I made my start, working with [interactive theatre company] Parabolic Theatre, and I’m still an associate artist there, as well as working very closely with Owen Kingston [Parabolic’s Artistic Director] and various other exciting people on the upcoming interactive experience, Bridge Command. I also work as an interactive narrative design consultant, I think is the term that I basically decided I would use. I’ve done a bit of tv stuff with that: I consulted on a Channel Four show that needed an interactive scenario for various people who wanted to come and pretend that they were politicians.
I came into interactive work as an actor, on Parabolic show For King and Country. From there I wrote the Parabolic show Crisis? What Crisis? And thanks to the stewardship I got during that experience, I was able to see that I may be able to make some stuff myself and sort of take a bit more of a creative role.
Then, when lockdown came along, like most interactive theatre performers, I had rent to pay and no way of paying it. So, together with Joe Ball of Exit Productions, Edward Andrews and Ellie Russo, I created a show called Jury Duty, which became the company Jury Games, which is still going strong. We started as a heavily interactive online experience, and it is now still performed online. There are two follow up shows, which have a similar concept of getting the audience to look through evidence and interview live actors as to what’s really going on. And all three of those shows now exist live as well. Our newest show, Death at the Office Party, is currently running out in the city at Theatre Deli, who have been extremely welcoming to us over the last six months or so.
voidspace
You talk about being an interactive theatre maker. I often ask people what interactive means when it comes to theatre, when it comes to games, when it comes to all of these experiences. And everyone seems to have a slightly different definition, a slightly different view of what makes a piece truly interactive. I’d be interested to hear your take on that.
Tom Black:
The very first thing I’m going to do is, arguably, correct myself, because you pointed out the reason that I usually call myself a maker of immersive-interactive work. The reason for that is that technically, a show that is in a proscenium setting and has 300 people sat in the dark, but has a voting mechanic to it, or has some element of audience participation, is to some degree interactive. In fact, could be very interactive. I’ve seen shows which are. They are conventionally done, as it were, with the stage and so on, but the audience do get input every maybe ten minutes, voting about things. And those are voting shows. Those are quite interesting. They’re not the kind of thing I do, and they’re not the kind of thing where, to my mind, the audience feels like they’re really part of what’s going on, a part of the same world.
I think it’s Owen Kingston who makes that distinction, and having been shaped by working with Parabolic, I think I have a similar view, which is immersive work is where the audience inhabit the same world, not just the same physical space as the actors. When it comes to what makes something interactive, that kind of leads on to the question of what does inhabiting the same world mean?
With stuff like Crisis? What Crisis? and Jury Games shows as well, you need to make sure it comes to a satisfying conclusion, whatever happens. But what that conclusion is and how it is arrived at is actually based on audience input, because I think to do anything else is not really interactive. It’s surface level interactivity. In terms of the kind of stuff I’m interested in making and what I would define as immersive-interactive work is something where you’re in a world, and if you push at the walls of that world, you actually find that they respond in some way.
voidspace:
So for you, the audience is a part of the world, but the audience also get a genuine say in the outcome of the show and what actually happens. There’s that push and pull between the two. How do you go about doing that?
Tom Black:
Yes. Crisis? What Crisis? was born from being involved with Parabolic’s For King and Country. It was originally going to be a board game. I had an idea for a cooperative board game based on the chaos of late 70s Britain. I pitched it to Owen [Kingston] and he said, “That sounds like a show”. I ran with that, and thought: For King and Country is in a wartime setting: there’s a clear, literal enemy involved. What can you do in a peacetime setting where the enemy, if you like, is malaise or chaos? You’re just the government trying to get through the day, rather than facing an existential threat that’s coming to occupy Britain, (in the case of For King and Country, the Nazis).
The first question to ask, when inviting an audience to play around in that world was, well, why do they care? You could pack the audience with Labour activists and they’d all want to stop Mrs. Thatcher getting in. We did that for some audiences: they didn’t need us to convince them of anything. But otherwise, how do you get people bought in?
What we did, is we used a turn-based system to build that buy in. Like in For King and Country, Crisis? What Crisis? operates on a turn basis, where you have a series of turns, chunks of time within which an audience does something. There’s then a brief pause where everyone’s gathered around, all together or in smaller groups, and they’re informed: “The things you and you and you did, as audience members, they have now had this effect”.
In Crisis? What Crisis? we had a turn zero moment where we did a simplified version of the show, showing the audience what was going to be happening throughout the rest of the show. Then, during that first update that people got after that turn zero, you could see people waking up to the fact that what they did had mattered. The second update, that came about an hour in, after the first full turn of people doing things. That time in particular, unless we hadn’t been doing our jobs very well, by the end of that, anyone who’d been paying attention in that room knew that the stuff that they were doing matters.
It works with Jury Games as well. Regardless of any story, or morality, or excitement you bolt onto it. That feedback, that feeling, like you put it a moment ago, of when you push against the walls and they push back, it’s like, “Oh, hang on a minute!” We spend our whole lives being sold certain things that are not necessarily actually as interactive or as richly detailed as they suggest. A lot of people come to immersive theatre, sadly, understandably, not really sure quite how much something is going to deliver, that degree of pulling you into that world. And to my mind, to be pulled into a world, you need to be in it yourself, you need to be able to interact with it, so that you can make something happen realistically, within the rules of that world.
In Jury Games, we allow people to ask the defendant questions. And there’s often, early on, a moment I call a magic moment. Where you can see people realise “Oh! It’s this kind of interactive!”. People will, maybe sheepishly, say “Can I ask him this?” And I say “Yes! He’s right there! The microphone is there! Go ahead!”. Then the actor will hear them and actually respond. And they’re like “That can’t be pre recorded. How do you do that?” And we say “No, it’s not pre recorded. This is real life” and so on. That’s a magic moment. That’s how you pull an audience in.
voidspace:
You’re giving people something to do. You’re giving them different tasks. In Crisis you had tasks that are economics based, tasks that are diplomacy based, so you can actually get on telephones and persuade MPs to vote with you. What’s really interesting about those is the fact that, as you say, as it doesn’t take very long to realise that you’re not just being humoured here, you’re not just being given a sense of agency, that what you do will actually change the outcome of events that the actors then play out in front of you.
Tom Black:
I think that there is a kind of show where the response you get from the show is basically “That’s great…Now let’s do what we were always going to do anyway.” I prefer the more heavily interactive stuff, myself. That said, eve in less heavily interactive shows I’ve had some really good moments where I’ve been able to tell that a show is a little bit on rails, but they’re giving me space to maybe say a great line to a cool character, and I like that.
I’ve said before that immersive theatre is selling vibes, a lot of the time. For Jury Games I try and make my little offices feel like you’re in a courtroom experience, and Crisis had to look like it was the 70s. If people don’t feel the right vibe when they come in, you’ve already lost.
voidspace:
Tell me a little bit about what actually goes on under the hood in a show like Crisis to deliver that interactivity? How do you get that balance between genuine agency and leaving the experience feeling dramatically and theatrically satisfying? How do you get that balance between the two?
Tom Black:
There are two anecdotes from the Crisis development process that are helpful here. The first is the journey from tiddlywinks to spreadsheets. I remember when Crisis was first being developed, the very first few little tests we did of it, were much based on that model. For King and Country, we had audience members working in different parts of the British government. We obviously had a similar thing for Crisis, but with more different departments, and more things to keep track of.
In For King and Country, there was a big map of troop movements. There were actually two maps, one upstairs with the games master running the show, and one downstairs in the room with the audience. The maps would simply be synchronised every so often via walkie talkie. And that was a good model for For King and Country. Crisis had, it turns out, many, many more moving parts. People’s pay rise percentages, the level of inflation, which MP was either voting abstaining or actively voting against the government, and so on.
The first version of the show we’d built had basically lots of bits of paper in front of a games master and loads of tiddly winks, marking which bits were true at any one time. It was kind of comical because it was no longer on a table. By the end of the first test, it was all over the floor. A quite a reasonably sized bar space had been turned into just a massive floor of paper.
We realised that we needed to immediately digitise it. I went home and made a spreadsheet, a very simple one that started with, I think, inflation maybe. Then it gradually began to get bigger and bigger and contain all of the numerical values within the show. From then on, whenever something happened in the show, there would be one computer in the room with the games master, or rather I should say games masters: we had four phone lines which meant that at any one time we needed four people able to answer the phone and say, “Switchboard! I’ll put you through to John Prescott” etc.
It was a big working ethos for me and everyone else in Crisis, we’d go, “well, we can’t really do that, silly. There’s no way we could do that. There’s too many balls in the air… And so what if we do actually try and do it?” What if we build a spreadsheet that has every single city in it and all the different levels of civil unrest that could be happening in it at once? Can you then make sure everyone in the room knows about that? And it turned out that yes, we could. Can we then have 60 different MPs that you can negotiate with? It turned out that yes, we could. Because we just gave it a go, and trusted our actors to do it.
The actors behind the scenes had these show bibles. Let’s say you were put through to John Prescott: an actor would grab the phone, get their binder out and then turn to the page about John Prescott, and if they hadn’t played John Prescott in a while, would reread the information that they need, information about accent and priorities for him as an MP and so on, and then they’d be ready and equipped.
voidspace:
How many ultimate outcomes would that spreadsheet spit out at the end of the show?
Tom Black:
There were four or five quite distinct endings. You could risk nuclear war. We had one night where it actually was implied there was going to be a nuclear war. That was fun. There was the stuff that could lead to a war, stuff where you could have a coup, stuff where you could win the vote of confidence in parliament and actually see off an election. There was one where you lost the vote of confidence and were there getting ready to have a general election. And within that, you had the various different sort of margins. Maybe you won the vote, but only by one. It’s been a real knife edge. Some nights people played really well and they actually ended up communicating.
Surprise, surprise, the way to win these scenarios is to communicate with each other. If you’re a team that’s smart, but crucially, more important than smart, if you listen to each other, then you can probably have a good stab at it. But if you’re all off doing your own little things, it will, quite deliberately, create chaos. It’s meant to. If you don’t communicate, your goals are not compatible with each other anyway.
Within that, there were other variables, in terms of of where, ideologically the government ended up on any given night. Let’s say, if the government won the vote, did they do it by actually moving somewhere to the right and winning over to Tory MPs? Did they go fully to the left and take a loan from the Soviet Union?
You mentioned about the need to have compelling narrative throughout. In another early test, we had what we called the Crisis, No Really, What Crisis? show. Because it was a show where there wasn’t really a crisis. The audience played very well. By about an hour and 15 minutes in, they’d pretty much solved everything. And the show at that point, of course, was clearly not structured properly, because they had too many opportunities to solve the problems they were coming up against. It wasn’t about pouring more problems into the situation. It was about structuring it so that different things happened at different times, so that you had more creative friction. Things the audience to have to work a little bit harder to do so.
Take writing by hand. If you require someone to handwrite something in an immersive show, if it’s set today, that would feel a bit weird, because that’s not something anyone would do. Whereas if it’s set back in the day, you can make the audience send things through by fax, and say “we haven’t got any time, so quick, grab a pen, write this down on here, and use that.” They are just writing something on a piece of paper and putting it in a fax machine. But with the stakes, and with the ticking clock and so on, it feels exciting.
A big part of the Parabolic ethos is that the audience have complete control from the word go. The audience can never take full control of a show, but they can very much take ownership of the show. They can take ownership of the roles that they’re in. But also, because we have ultimately sold tickets to a theatrical experience, we can’t just throw it over to an audience and let them run with it.
voidspace:
I suppose it’s a matter of establishing the rules of engagement: where it’s LARP and where it’s theatre. The line between the two is probably there, isn’t it?
Tom Black:
Exactly.
voidspace:
Tell me more about Jury Games. Give us a little overview of the concept.
Tom Black:
Jury Games was born in lockdown. There are loads of things you can’t do online in immersive theatre. There are so many things that I’d come to rely on: people working together, physical props, soundscapes, smells as well. They’re really fun to play with, if you can give something the right kind of feel. But there’s one thing you can do online, rather helpfully. I really like it when a conversation is the core of an immersive show, and Zoom is actually quite good at that, at connecting people to have a conversation with a live actor.
And so I had this initial thought of a conversation, where you’re talking to someone who’s been accused of something, and it’s your job to find out whether they did it or not. I contacted Joe Ball of Exit Productions and he very quickly suggested, what if, rather than one on one, if it’s twelve people, because it’s a jury? I liked that because that’s twelve times as many tickets, which is of course why he suggested it.
The idea of the original Jury Duty show, from which the others have all evolved, is that you’re in a new kind of trial system. In the online version, you’re all taking part remotely, and in the live version, you’re in an office space that’s been taken over and has a live video link to the defendant. So in both shows, you’re actually not in the same room as the defendant, which is a deliberate, dramatic choice, when it comes to the live one, for pacing.
And we’re talking just now about the need to maintain a dramatic order of events and being able to inject some dramatic tension into it. To briefly jump back to Crisis: an hour and a half in, something big and dramatic is going to happen, that you weren’t expecting. What that thing is will depend on what you were keeping an eye on earlier. Or rather, what you didn’t keep an eye on, because you don’t have enough eyes and hands in the room to handle everything. Spoiler: there will be a thing that’s going to go wrong at some point, that will make sense in the context of what you’ve actually done that night, and what you can see, with hindsight, that you missed, and then it will hopefully feel more rewarding and real.
With Jury Duty, you have these five minute slots where you can talk to the defendant, when he’s on screen, and then you’re cut off again. And that creates some interesting tension. It goes both ways. It creates a sense of distance, so people are less trusting of the person who’s on trial. But it can also invoke a different response: people feeling like it’s maybe a little bit dodgy. Or a bit authoritarian that this person’s being tried remotely. Why aren’t they here? Aren’t there meant to be judges? Jury Duty plays with what an audience expects to see in the justice system, very deliberately.
The lockdown version of it went really well. It was meant to run for a couple of weeks, to see what happened with it, and it just kept going. And not long after third lockdown, the country did begin to open up again, and we started thinking about what we could do with live versions of this. Scrolling through pdfs and so on became looking at physical evidence and examining CCTV footage.
What we did in Jury Duty was to keep it really simple, really accessible: you are you. You are a juror. Everyone knows what a juror is. You have been selected to do this. So it’s you, with your name on the email that comes in and so on. You don’t have to play a character. You don’t have to say that you’re a detective or anything like that. And the way that we made that really reach through the screen was we asked our jurors for their mobile phone numbers, and they would get mysterious text messages, leaking them various bits of information during the trial.
Phones would ring as well, which was great, fun. People would go like, “oh, my God! My phone’s ringing!”, and there’d be a creepy robot voice that would tell them stuff.
Weirdly, there’s a level of immersion on an individual level that you can get when you’re doing a show online. It’s actually a little harder in the room, in a large group of people who are physically present together. In lockdown, people were sat in the room that they’re normally in, and they’ve not changed the environment around them. But if the moment their phone rings on the table, then actually it’s not just this thing they’re looking at on their screen, it’s right here, in the room with them. This is their personal phone, in their personal space.
voidspace:
How did you go about creating something like this, purely online, in a lockdown scenario for the first time?
Tom Black:
What happened is that, at the start of lockdown, Joe Ball of Exit Productions put together an online R&D festival for immersive theatre practitioners, to try and make four or five ideas.
We had a lot of a lot of creatives who suddenly, because of lockdown, had nothing to do, and we were able to really play with it. We got some really quite top class people. We had people who’d worked with Boomtown, we had people who were internationally recognised LARP creators, some real heavyweights. We got together on Zoom and on Slack, all the remote working things that creatives had to rapidly catch up on during lockdown, and got into a rhythm of creating stuff and testing it as much as possible.
voidspace:
Once you got audiences involved, did you find that, was there a difference in terms of how audiences were engaging with this kind of work online? And if so, did you find a way around that?
Tom Black:
That’s a very good point. Right at the start, we were coming into a space that was basically just doing quizzes with your family on a Friday night. Which is fine, but maybe not every Friday night. Corporate bookings became a big part of what we were doing, because companies were looking for ways to keep their teams connected socially beyond just workspace Zoom calls. That was really interesting, because those would be the ones where maybe you’d have a higher chance of people checking out, or not being very active, not wanting to say anything.
We did have shows where no one said anything, literally no one. We were always able to finish the show just about, someone would maybe type questions into the chat, and then the actor would have to just read them. That was certainly better than just complete silence. Everyone was learning how that stuff works.
As for how we overcame it, that goes back to what I was saying earlier about turn zero, teaching people early on that they can push the walls of the world, and that they matter. In Jury Duty, that moment would come half an hour in, at the moment they actually get to talk to the live actor. In that first interview, he will say some things that don’t quite match what the jurors have got in front of them, in the written evidence, and it creates that nice basic tutorial, that you can bring out and test the differences between the two and decide which you believe. You often find that people would catch onto that, and suddenly – they’re in.
One of the most satisfying things in this business is when the people who are too cool for school at the start and arrive taking the mic are all in by the end. Because they’ve realised that they can actually pull these levers and they’ll make things happen in the show.
voidspace:
What was it like, after lockdown was lifted, bringing Jury Games back into a physical space?
Tom Black:
It’s one of my favourite things that I’ve done. Coming through lockdown, and being able to make something in those circumstances that really worked was already something that myself, Joe Ball, Edward Andrews, Ellie Russo, we’re all really proud of it. Then getting the in person physical version of Jury Games on its feet, and doing the thing that we all got into this business to do, live work, that was a really exciting challenge to take on, and watching it work was really great.
The show is easier now to figure out in person, because you can communicate with each other in the room, again. All these shows are about communication. I’m a one trick pony. I make shows where if you were able to sit down with the information in front of you for 4 hours on your own, you would nail it. But you don’t have 4 hours and there’s at least twelve of you. That’s the twist, right? So you’re not reading a novel, where you can just see where it is going. You’ve got different pieces of information in lots of different places and lots of different media, and you can’t encounter it all yourselves.
We say that at the start of Jury Games shows. Some groups, very understandably, politely want to go round and read everything together. And we just jump in and we tell them “You don’t have time to do that: you’ll run out of time. You should all be reading separate stuff.”
One thing we did discover, was the benefit of having a giant whiteboard, which we first came across at some corporate bookings for some very big companies. One wall of the room is just all whiteboard. We do that at Theatre Deli now, and it’s so cool. Every single time a show ends, we look up there and see what the audience wrote up, how everything connects together. It looks like a serial killer diagram with all the red pen connecting everything up.
We’re still experimenting as well. At the moment we’re reworking one of our Jury Games shows, The Inquest, to really embrace the nature of it being live and physical. That’s our most digitally focused show, and it does work in person at the moment, but we want to bring in a couple more physical, tangible elements.
voidspace:
It’s great that you have the ability to do that now and still do things iteratively and adapt it. What does the future hold for Jury Games?
Tom Black:
We started this run of Jury Games at Theatre Deli back in May. It was going to be a four week run, and we’re still there. It just worked. They’ve been extremely welcoming. Theatre Deli is a great space, next to Leadenhall Market, in the shadow of the Gherkin, so it’s a nice location for people to get to. In December we did our Christmas show there, the Office Christmas Party, and we’re still there now.
Jury Games is still going strong. We’re selling public tickets and taking private bookings, and we also will pop up in your office if that’s of interest. For corporates, we still do that, or indeed we’ll come to you for a birthday party, and so on. We’re doing that with all three of our shows.
Until last Christmas, we only had two shows on sale, Jury Duty and The Inquest. Then we had The Office Christmas Party. We recorded CCTV for the Christmas party. That’s the USP of that show: you have a full set of CCTV to scroll through. You have to sort through people’s secret Santa gifts and work out what that means. It is more silly, that one, but it’s fun. It’s fun to have one that is a bit more light hearted. There is still a good mystery at the heart of it: you put it all together and it clicks into place. Hopefully it’s the same satisfying feeling you get from the other two, but the tone is a bit sillier, because you’re talking to two people who are very hungover and have been doing stupid things at a party, rather than the slightly darker subject matter of the others.
We’ve got a version of that to run outside of the Christmas season, Death at the Office Party. We’re going to keep running in Leadenhall, and we’ll be there as long as Theatre Deli will have us.
voidspace:
What do you think the future holds for interactive work?
Tom Black:
A lot of shows have closed in the last twelve months, some of which have been quite long standing things or were looking to be long standing things. It’s brilliant that Vaults festival has got this new venue, and is aiming to do a thing in the autumn of next year, but through no fault of theirs we are losing their usual festival, that key moment in the calendar which is usually a great engine room for new immersive and small scale interactive things. That all sounds very downbeat, but to be honest, I think I’m happy to be a little bit downbeat about it, because I think there needs to be a bit more energy behind making and supporting this kind of work.
I’d be remiss at this point not to mention Bridge Command, which is going to be extremely exciting.
voidspace:
What is Bridge Command?
Tom Black:
You and your friends get to command the bridge of a starship. You get to decide where it goes and do all the jobs and you actually get to do that. It’s episodic, and what you do in your first story will be remembered in your second one, and so on and so on.
That should be really exciting and will hopefully bring a load of new audience members into this kind of work, because that’s the thing that we really need.
The worry we have in London at the moment is that some of the bigger shows have fallen away. We haven’t got a regular Secret Cinema show coming along, and obviously, The Burnt City is now closed. The stuff that used to be in the calendar, pulling in brand new audiences. We do need an engine room to pull people in, and my hope is that Jury Games is that, and that Bridge Command will be that. The things that get people asking if there is anything else like this out there, that acts as a springboard for discovering more.
What makes Bridge Command such a great potential springboard is the fact that it utilises video game tech. There’s been a lot of talk in the industry, for a long time now, about the potential in a genuinely playable crossover between live theatre and video games. I’m really excited that Bridge Command is going to make that crossover a reality: there’s a massive audience waiting for someone to properly bring video games to life, and so many creative possibilities to make the experience unlike anything that’s been seen before.
voidspace:
What advice do you have for aspiring creators in this field?
Tom Black:
My advice to people looking to make this sort of work is: go to it. Go to this stuff; go to as much of it as you can. You would be surprised by how many theatre makers are willing to subsidise or just help out with free tickets for people who make this kind of thing and want to just come and see things.
A lot of your favourite theatre makers are probably at any one time building something that they’re going to need test audiences for. And so a great thing to do is just put yourself on their radar. It costs them nothing to get you down to help test their show. So get in touch and see if you can do those, because that’s a great way to see new people’s work, because I’m aware that it’s not always affordable or viable for people to just go and see everything that’s on.
The other thing I’d say is, don’t second guess whether something is possible in terms of, like, whether you can get audiences on board. If it’s within the laws of physics, if it’s within the law, if it won’t require 10 million pounds, try it.
There was some stuff in Crisis that we thought would just be too crazy to work. Like synchronising a dvd player to kick something off at the same moment that an audience member agrees something over the phone, with people in different rooms making it all work to time. We thought “well, that’s never going to work.” But then we realised, if you think about it, that it’s just three human beings synchronising something, which people regularly do in lots of different contexts. So we thought that maybe we should try it. And we did try it, and we rehearsed it, and it worked, and it created a very cool moment.
So that would be my big piece of advice. Don’t be afraid to try stuff, because that’s how you end up with something new.
Find out more about Jury Games
Find out more about Bridge Command