“The problem is this: we can’t send the guests mad. The insurance won’t cover sending guests mad, so we have to do it in a different way.” This is one of the many issues confronting Ivan Carić, Laura Langrish and Leo Doulton, the creative team behind weekend long epic The Key of Dreams, when deciding how to bring a true sense of horror to a manor house in Wales. We welcome them into the voidspace to talk about Lovecraft, dispersed storytelling, and why it’s always important to remember Ken’s Mum.
[This interview was conducted before The Key of Dreams opened in April 2024.]
voidspace:
Welcome to the voidspace. Thank you for joining us. I like to think of the voidspace as being a sort of small, slightly dusty attic in the top of a house somewhere. It’s kind of gently haunted, but it’s also bit cosy. I’m going to invite you to pull up a beanbag, and I’d offer you a cup of tea if we were in the same room, all of that. Welcome.
I’m going to start off by asking you all to introduce yourselves and tell me what you do in this interactive space.
Ivan Carić:
Hello. I’m Ivan Carić. I am the founder and creative director of Lemon Difficult, who are producing The Key of Dreams.
My previous show was Locksmith’s Dream, still running a couple of years in, which is in a similar vein, but this is a spiritual successor to that. My background is business, I guess – telecoms process, business transformation, lots of exciting buzzwords – and this is what I’ve been doing for the last three years.
Laura Langrish:
I’m Laura Languish, Ivan’s partner and lead writer on Key of Dreams.
Leo Doulton:
And I’m Leo Doulton. I’m Associate Creative Director of the aforementioned company.
I think it’s fair to say I’m one of the longest standing friends of the void. I was in voidpace’s first edition.
Other than that, what have I done? I’ve made interactive immersive opera. I’ve made Come Bargain With Uncanny Things, an interactive immersive opera where you come bargain with uncanny things, and various other bits of interactive theatre.
I am not married to either of these people.
voidspace:
Sad times. Not all of us can be, I suppose.
I’d also say that, yes, as a longstanding friend of the void, it’s lovely to have you back, Leo, and Laura and Ivan, it’s lovely to have both of you here for the first time.
So, just to start off, let’s talk about what The Key of Dreams is for people who’ve never heard of it before, don’t know anything about it. Where do we start?
Laura Langrish:
I guess I’m going to go for the first bit. It’s a site-specific, interactive Lovecraftian theatrical experience. So, it is a mixture of theatre, puzzles, interactive experiences, amazing food, and a beautiful venue.
Ivan Carić:
The idea is that the guests, the audience will have a fair amount of agency; that there isn’t genuinely a right way to do it.
Lots of things say there isn’t a right way to do it, but there is, and you get more out of it if you do it ‘right’. So, this experience is designed to make people feel clever, but not in a patronising ‘here you are’ sort of a way. Every single part of it, you can engage with or not on your own terms, so you can believe and throw yourself into it.
And because of the length of the experience, it means that we can provide something quite unique: people generally change from a state of casual engagements to deeper engagement, because they’re fundamentally there for 24 hours.
voidspace:
I was going to say, let’s just set that out clearly, assuming that our readers are coming with no prior knowledge. It takes place over 24 hours.
And you were saying something, Laura, about the venue. Can you explain what? Because I think this is something that makes it quite different from a lot of other interactive immersive experiences.
Laura Langrish:
Currently, we work with a venue in Wales which is a 17th century manor house, and we have the entire house and the ground to set the experience in. We literally take over the house.
It’s very hard, once you’re in it and in the experience, to see what belongs to the house and what belongs to the experience. It all feels like it fits. It’s an amazing set to play with in that it’s a very real place as well.
As part of that, in building the experience, we take the real history of the place and weave that through the stories, so that if you were to go away and look it up, there’d be enough truth in there to go “what bits are actually real and what bits are fiction?” And it can be very hard to tell sometimes.
voidspace:
I love that. I love that, because I do think that in the early days of immersive theatre, particularly thinking about Punchdrunk’s early history, site-specific, immersive and whatever form of interaction, were much more closely bound together than they often are nowadays. Partly out of necessity, I think, because at the time, 20 years ago or 25 years ago, it was easier to find a vacant building and build something around that, rather than to have your own permanent venue.
It’s interesting that a time where companies like Punchdrunk and Secret Cinema are actually moving towards getting permanent venues, or creating agile touring productions that don’t rely on a site-specific setting, you guys are actually going the other way.
Ivan Carić:
It’s interesting because the constraints do drive innovation. Because you have to figure out a way to use what you’ve actually got.
So, you do sometimes end up with something arguably better than if you’ve designed it from scratch. Because designing from scratch, you don’t really have any constraints. And therefore, it might be less imaginative, it might be better, it might not, but it’s certainly less imaginative.
voidspace:
That is this theme that has run through so many of the interviews that I’ve run. That constraint actually sparks more creativity than if you do have a completely blank slate.
Ivan Carić:
I mean, obviously it’s not what you’re saying at the time. Swearing and saying “oh my God. What can we do!” It doesn’t feel like it at the time.
Leo Doulton:
And also, admittedly, although obviously creative constraints inspire creativity, if someone were to say, “hey, here’s 10 million pounds, remove those constraints,” we ain’t saying no. I think that’s fair to say.
voidspace:
This is true. This is true. That’s absolutely fair.
Leo Doulton:
I think there’s a Stockholm syndrome.
voidspace:
I’d really like to talk in detail about the mechanics of this and the creative influences, etcetera, etcetera. Before we get to that, I’d just be really interested in a bit of the history of this idea and how you got to this point.
Ivan Carić:
Personally, I worked mentioned in the corporate world for a very long time. Before that I was in sociology and social research. So again, a completely different kind of world. But I’ve always had an interest in horror theatre and fancy science fiction.
I guess I’m a fairly typical geek. And after my dad died a few years ago during COVID I reassessed things, and I was given the opportunity to work on The Locksmith’s Dream, which is based on a small obscure IP of a particular computer game, and I thought, why not give it a go?
Laura and Marianne encouraged me because I’m quite risk averse. And it was the first time I’d hired an actor or commissioned a composer or done any of these things that we ended up doing.
And therefore we ended up with the shape of The Locksmith’s Dream. Initially the idea was “Come to a nice house. There are some puzzles. There are some actors there that you engage with. There’s a living world that you can live in. And there’s some nice food and that’s that.”
But I wanted to add more characterisations; more stories, particularly stories that you engage with. They’re like deconstructed stories. So, you’re following the trails of these things that have happened.
Because I think there’s a power to standing in a place; I don’t know, you’re standing at a window, looking out at the lawn. The moon’s shining down on it, and you’ve just read a story or a letter from. This is the spot where such and such was standing, waiting for the person to come back. There’s a little shiver that goes down your spine and it’s a little moment of delight that is very specific to the place and the smells and all of those things. So rather than have actors obviously act out all of the various stories and narratives, which would have been very, very difficult, the idea was to have elements that were acted separately with those, but then to have all of these other narratives broken up.
That was the start of it. The other element is that it was to attract and have a range of different people with different approaches.
There are obviously social conventions. When we go to a theatre or an immersive show, you learn what those are. So Punchdrunk, you put on the mask or the cape. If you’re at Masque of the Red Death and you’re told or shown how you’re meant to engage with the experience. And there’s bits you can engage with versus bits you can’t. But everyone has to behave the same.
Now, we have game geeks, we have puzzle and escape room people, and we have immersive theatre people and everything in between. The challenge is to make it work for all of them so they can get what they want out of it. People might move from one category to another.
The actors are key to that, to be able to engage with audiences, to push when someone wants to tell a story. One of the things that I love, and there’s a couple of anecdotes, it’s not even the great reviews from whoever said this was amazing.
We’ve had a few people come over from the States. About 50%, 45% of the people have come so far have come from the States, because they’re fans of the world. And it’s a young person in their early twenties and their mum. It’s a particular example. And she’s there as a chaperone, really. She’s a bit bemused by it all, but she’s there. She’s having a good time and she’s in the bar chatting to one of the actors. And she’s there permanently, for the most part. She does a few jigsaw puzzles. And the actor is a sinister creature that is interested in people’s memories and people’s stories-
Leo Doulton:
Sorry. The character the actor’s playing.
Ivan Carić:
Sorry. Yes, the character the actor is playing.
Leo Doulton:
Not that actors aren’t in general, suspicious creatures interested in people’s stories.
voidspace:
You’re talking about writers there, Leo.
Leo Doulton:
Sorry. Writers. Deeply suspicious. Never trust them.
Ivan Carić:
No, but it was just to say that by the end of the evening she’s exchanging stories and effectively enthralled with this actor. And she’s unrecognisable from the start of the experience.
It’s not a big thing. It’s not like she’s suddenly a rating or anything, but she’s the centre of attention. She’s telling this terrible story about these kittens that she discovered that – [Laura gives a look] No? The kittens. This terrible story about this tragedy she discovered as a child, and she only discovered the truth after a feud with her sister the previous year.
You can fill in the details yourself and it’s deeply personal, tragic, not funny. But she’s suddenly got an audience around her and she’s telling it and she’s part of the show. She’s the centre of attention for that 60 seconds. And that, I think, is the real difference that I love about this. And lots of people enjoyed it for a whole bunch of different reasons. But when you can take someone on a journey like that and make them feel comfortable and then engage on their own terms.
voidspace:
That is the holy grail of audience engagement, because I think a lot of experiences want to do that.
I have a lot of strongly held views on what works and what doesn’t work in terms of how to help your audience feel immersed enough to interact with the world of the show honestly and without barriers, as much as possible.
I have a real problem with shows that try to directly engage people but end up pandering. You can make things too easy, you can make things too smooth, you can make things too pat, and then I don’t feel engaged, I just feel pandered to. Or you can have it all.
Conversely, you can be asking too much of your audience, and it can be very difficult for people who are maybe not natural role players, or whatever, to break that dividends or reticence to really fully, imaginatively participate.
Actually, first of all, Leo, I’d like to hear a bit about what brought you to this project. But after that, I would love to talk more about how you create an experience that allows the holy grail of immersion, if you like.
Leo Doulton:
I came to this project because I commented on something on the site at that point known as Twitter.
Essentially, I’d read a discussion in The Stage about the show, and it had mentioned that they were not only running this 24 hours immersive experience, which was “wow, that’s cool and ambitious”, but also that they were doing something based on Lovecraft in the future.
I have a deep and complex relationship with Lovecraft. I really like a lot of the underlying ideas. I really, really dislike some of the underlying ideas, and particularly the man himself. You will see my colleagues nodding sarcastically.
And then I had the pleasure of meeting Ivan in a cafe in London, and we discussed it. We seemed to get on well. We essentially then spent the next three to six months talking about the show. And eventually it emerged that maybe I was working on this one and that I got a job title and everything. I went to Locksmith’s Dream. I gave some notes on it as an outside consultant, and that’s more or less how I got involved.
I’m now helping write large chunks of it and do bits of dramaturgy in terms of the Holy Grail, as you put it.
I think the main thing is both understanding what different sorts of people might come, and what different sorts of people might reasonably come as well.
Some people say “my show is for everyone”, and what they mean is “my show is everyone who is likely to turn up”. And that’s a really important difference.
I work in marketing. A lot of people tell me their show is for everyone, and then I find out “no, it’s bloody not”, pardon the language. It’s partly that. It’s also partly understanding different levels of engagement and commitment and comfort with engagement.
So those two axes work in different ways. In terms of what sort of people might turn up, there are people who just love puzzles. They want to just sit there and solve riddles and codes and all the rest of it all day. So, it’s making sure they have enough to do and feel important.
There are people who want character led drama and making sure, therefore, that all the characters are fully realised.
There are people who want more… what I would describe as traditional theatrical dramaturgy. So, making sure that the entire show follows a narrative structure that feels Lovecraftian, for want of a better phrase.
And there’s also people who fundamentally turn up because they really love someone who wants to come and they are willing to spend 24 hours sitting there watching them have fun. And those are the audience member we most often find ourselves talking about, because the people who are there and they want to have fun in this way, they’re quite easy to cater for. You just make sure there is enough of the stuff they want.
Whereas I’m going to name this audience member where we all know who we’re talking about, but Ken’s Mum. The person’s name wasn’t Ken, but Ken’s Mum is a person we often talk about, because one thing you can do, of course, if you have an interactive actor, is you can go over and talk to Ken’s Mum and make her feel valued and important.
We’re trying to make sure that we’re in an even better place in The Key of Dreams to make sure that there’s loads of different ways for someone to see it and say “Hang on, Ken’s Mum’s not having the best evening. What can we do to help Ken’s Mum?”
voidspace:
What do you do to help Ken’s mum?
Leo Doulton:
Mostly, you go over there and talk to her like a human being. And you go “well, Ken’s mum, what are you into?”
And Ken’s mum says “I really, really like dessert.” And you say to Ken’s mum “well, that’s great. There’s a seven course banquet coming up. Until that point, are you the sort of person who potentially is good with people? Would you like to have someone to talk to?”
And then you can point her towards – whisper it, but there might be secret societies in the Lovecraft show – you can point her towards a secret society where she can turn up and have a chat with other people in the show; those people might know stuff Ken’s Mum doesn’t know and help her understand it better.
It might also be that Ken’s Mum is better with human beings, for most humans have some vague awareness of how to interact with other human beings, so it’s quite an easy level of engagement.
I’m being a little sarcastic. It’s been a long day, but that’s the gist of it. The other thing, of course, is, as aforementioned, it’s tailoring to all of those different tastes. And that is partly, of course, making sure that you’ve got different strands of content to deal with.
It’s also making sure all of those strands of content serve the core goal of the show, making sure that all of them contribute to a growing sense of the universe collapsing around you, and the world’s not mattering. These senses are integral to Lovecraft, but theoretically, you could have a show with a lot of puzzles in it which didn’t really help tell a story. You could just turn up, do the puzzles and not ever find out what was actually going on.
voidspace:
Makes sense. All of your creative resources at creating a sense of growing creeping dread and terror.
Leo Doulton:
Have we talked about the story?
voidspace:
We have not talked about the story yet.
Leo Doulton:
I’m going to tell you the story very quickly. The guests are all members of the Friends of Miskatonic University, a sort of adventurers’ organisation affiliated with the Miskatonic University.
They are there to help a somewhat older gentleman who has recently inherited a strange house and is having weird dreams and other experiences. They are there to help. That is their function. It is a very clear hook. Go and help a nice gentleman. He’s very nice.
We definitely don’t have a nickname for him. Am I allowed to say the nickname?
Ivan Carić:
I can’t stop you. I can’t stop you.
Leo Doulton:
That sounds like a no. I will let Laura say the nickname if it’s permissible.
Laura Langrish:
We decided it was very important to have a character that people could like.
In Locksmith’s Dream, I would say that none of the characters are inherently likeable. They’re all interesting, but none of them are lovable characters. They’re all difficult in some way. And Leo in particular was very adamant that we need to have a heart; someone who people could like and want to help. And Leo came up with the term that I completely leapt on and used, which irritates Ivan, but we’re going to use it. The character will not be known as to anyone but us as Omnidad.
Ivan Carić:
The characters are… Leo’s points about that are critical. I know that seems a strange thing to say, given that it’s a theatrical show, obviously.
But more than that, one of the things that we want to do to provide that kind of immersion, which we had a bit of in Locksmith’s Dream, but we will have more.
Here is this idea that you can build a relationship with the characters because the actors to guest ratio is four or five to one, so it’s very small. You’re there with them for the whole day, right? So you’re going to eat with them, you’re going to be in that house and you can chat to them, you can sit down with them.
In fact, one of the loveliest things that someone said about Locksmith’s Dream was “they’re talking, just like I was talking to a person”. And just to be clear, they were talking about weird occult sh*t. Sorry. But they said, no, “it’s just like they weren’t like a character, they were just a person. I was sitting and chatting.”
Laura Langrish:
They were one of the nuttiest characters that we had as well.
Ivan Carić:
You can build a relationship with the character and then you can help them or hinder them or betray them. Right. And to have reasons to do that rather than “oh, well, you make a choice now, you betray or you don’t betray without sort of any sort of context.”
So, you’ve seen them maybe do something suspicious, maybe you’ve seen them be mean to someone else that you actually like, or you’ve read something suspicious about them. They’ve given you a non-answer that really satisfies you.
And then for you then to make a choice and then make a decision, maybe gang up with some other audience members and guests, and then to actually follow through on that, that’s one of the goals.
That feels potentially really quite powerful, because often when you make a choice [in a show or game], you don’t really understand the context or you’re just making a choice because there is a choice to be made. But these are genuine things that you’ll be able to do. So, each character will have a number of different endings or outcomes that can happen, which will happen or won’t.
It’s not as if they’re scripted and they have to happen, but those will all be affected by the audience agency.
voidspace:
That’s amazing. My mind is slightly boggling at this because I’m familiar with the kind of crisis management show where the audience can have a genuine impact on the arc of the show.
I know that the way they run that is to have a GM [Game Master] room at the back, and a massive spreadsheet and lots of variables and communication and things that can be fed in.
How do you begin to run a show where every character has distinct endings depending on audience action? And how do you do that in a 24-hour fully immersive environment where no one can just nip out and tell the GM, how do you do that?
Leo Doulton:
I’m going to leap in because I suspect I’m the person with the most touchstones for crisis management shows.
So obviously, in a crisis management show, you have an offstage GM, and that solves a lot of problems because you can bring the external world into existence by having someone outside it do stuff.
We don’t really have a GM. What we have is a very good ensemble cast of actors who we’ve mostly worked with previously on Locksmith’s Dream. Well, I didn’t do Locksmith’s Dream, but the team have. And that means that there was a sort of collective GM-ing of the show, which requires a level of trust in the performers, which is really fun, frankly.
It also requires a level of yes, planning, particularly over 24 hours. And therefore – I think you’ve spoken with Owen Kingston before on this and his concept of adaptive narrative, and the way that you have a sense of the core flavour and beats of each moment in the show, even if you don’t know exactly what will happen.
So, we’ve stolen bits of that and added some other bits of flair that are unique to this. We don’t have a fancy name for it yet, but we will.
I think fundamentally, you have to do the genre properly, and do so over 24 hours. Fundamentally, it relies on that trust between the team. It also, admittedly, really helps that although it’s a manor house, and that does have some consequence in terms of people needing to move around, it also means that you can normally have at least one of us wandering around the house, so that if anyone does need to relay a message or go “what actually happened? Now they’ve done this! The guests have had an idea and it’s complicated.” We can respond “Cool.” We’re going to do it, but if it’s complicated the actors can normally find someone and we can run a message around.
voidspace:
So you have runners, basically.
Leo Doulton:
There’s us, and there’s also the ‘house staff’ who are secretly helping run the show. For example, they do things like run to find someone and say “by the way, an audience member is going to try and poison you.”
Laura Langrish:
We have had people say, we’ve got to the end of this story and we know that this is what the ending should be. It should be this or this. But effectively what we want to do is this instead, because they’re engaged and think that’s really cool. And the actor’s gone, yeah, great. Let me sort that out.
They go backstage to one of the bedrooms that was set aside for storage and go “the guests want to do this. Can we?” And I say “yeah, we can do that.”
We wrote The Key of Dreams with that much more in mind. We’ve thought those things through more. I would say there is more choice in terms of what we expect to be the outcomes. It could also be this and what would we do? There is lots of that.
You mentioned having lots of spreadsheets backstage. We have lots of spreadsheets up front. When we did our last show, I think the actors, particularly Emily Carding–
Voidspace:
Friend of the void, Emily Carding! [Carding performed Richard III: A One Person Show at voidspace live 2024, in association with Theatre Deli on 9 June 2024]
Laura Langrish:
Once they were handed a spreadsheet and a 40 page document and told, “go and learn that; it’s not a script. It’s stuff. You need to know that stuff.”
They looked up and went, “what?” But Emily is amazing. And there’s a lot of “these are the stories you need to know. All these stories you need to know where these stories can go and when they can change. And if it changes, where do they go next? And then how does that affect the way your character will react and how does that affect the way your character will interact with another character if this story’s gone that way?”
There’s so many moving parts, but I think everyone becomes their own GM in a way.
Ivan Carić:
Sort of, but also in a way that doesn’t necessarily ruin or change the experience for other people. You know what I mean?
Again, to take a role-playing analogy, there are collaborative role-playing games. There’s nothing wrong with them. They’re absolutely fine. They’re not my cup of tea, necessarily. I’m interested in somebody’s vision, right? And it might be rubbish or it might be fantastic, but it’s interesting because it is their thing.
So, if I play a game, that’s what I’m interested in. The collaborative elements are academically interesting to me, but I don’t get as much emotionally out of them. So we want people to be able to enhance the experience for other guests, but not diminish it. So they’re always adding.
But the big thing about the actors and the sorts of changes that they can do and how we deal with that was your question. How you actually manage it is by trying to teach people the grammar of the experience and for that to grow as the time goes on, to give people a feeling of mastery, which might be an odd thing to say; so they can come to understand how the world works and to effectively be able to do things that wouldn’t have made much sense to them at the start of the experience, but does halfway through or towards the end.
I appreciate that’s a bit cryptic, but I’m trying not to give any concrete examples. But by doing that, you end up with emergent play in a way that doesn’t feel artificial or forced on people. So someone might say “I’ve had this fantastic idea. I know these two characters, they’re feuding. It’s been clear all the way along. They really dislike each other. And this has got this particular flavour of thing, this thing they like, this thing they don’t like. I can use that to get a piece of information to achieve some sort of effect or whatever.” And to your point, at that point, they are becoming almost an actor in the experience.
voidspace:
I absolutely agree that maintaining narrative integrity is really important. I always feel that if I go to an interactive theatrical experience, I’m buying a ticket to get someone else’s story, not to have to make my own story.
Like, if I wanted to do that, I could do that on my own time and my own money. I think we’re totally on the same page there.
So just out of interest, because it sounds like you combine your performer-led storytelling with, I think you call it dispersed narrative, or world building, but the story’s dissipated through the house itself. Does that mean, though, that your performers have to be conversant with every bit of written material in the house as well?
Leo Doulton:
No, is the short answer.
Ivan Carić:
Not in Locksmith’s Dream. But this has more content in it than that. You explain Leo.
Leo Doulton:
I think, essentially, we have larger chunks of written material. Because this show is based on an out of copyright IP, we’ve had to create more things and revise things.
But equally, the actual question is how much do the actors have to memorise? And we’ve tried to be better at giving each actor a distinct area of responsibility so that it is maybe easier for them to memorise. Apparently, memorising an entire 24 hours show is, ‘difficult’.
Ivan Carić:
The thing is that we’ve been running Locksmith’s Dream for about two years now, and the actors are brilliant.
I mean, the last show was phenomenal, and it’s the best show we’ve done, partly due to the audience, but also the level of proficiency that the actors have. The shows are different every time, depending on who the audience is and what the mix is there.
The ability to learn and pick up the stuff and also respond, gauge how the audience is going to behave, how particular audience members react, what they’re actually interested in, and then the things that the actors develop we can share with the other actors when we have the mid-show debriefs and the post mortems and so on.
There are strategies and little devices that they’ve developed to solve a particular problem or to deal with a particular deal with a particular guest, to enhance the experience of a particular guest or audience members, which then become common knowledge in the group.
And so we are lucky in that we have got largely the same team so far. I think it would be very difficult to do with changing most of the team after every couple of shows. I think it would be horrendous.
voidspace:
Something I’ve seen in this work is that there is a set of slightly different, depending on the type of show, but very much related skill sets, which are not primarily performance skill sets, but they are actually about communication and about reading people and about being able to anticipate what your person is going to find fulfilling or what is going to work for them.
I know, sorry to go back to Punchdrunk, but it’s kind of the touchstone for popularising this sort of thing, so it feels natural to use them as a reference point. They started by working a lot with dancers, because dancers are used to contact improv and in theory, reading body language and establishing comfort on a very, very basic level. That’s cool.
But it sounds like what you have here is actually something a lot more advanced. You’re not just trying to read a binary yes-or-no physical level of comfort with what’s happening. You’re now actually working to anticipate what’s going to work for the audience in a far more sophisticated way. And I’m finding it really interesting how that skill set along with the genre, just to use a big umbrella term, that takes all of these forms of interactive work into consideration.
I think it’s really interesting that as part of this genre that skill set is developing and becoming more sophisticated as time goes on. I’d love to see a workshop or a sharing or something that people would actually attend because they’re not all too possessive of their own particular strand of craft where these techniques could actually be shared and become common practise. And I think that would actually enrich everybody. But I don’t think we’re in a world yet where that would happen.
Leo Doulton:
Everyone is an expert and a specialist in their own uniquely developed craft and absolutely no one will share their techniques because we are all the best and therefore we have nothing to learn from the enemy. Sorry, the competition.
Laura Langrish:
Again, probably an aside, not worth going into, but it was something that Ivan and I discovered coming from early theatrical work when we were younger. And having been involved in that to some extent, I did performing arts degree as my starting point. So, performing arts was my background.
But to then come into it later, having been outside of it Ivan in particular came in with the “Well, wouldn’t it be great if we just all talked and shared and we had these ideas and we grew them together” and people are like “What?! No!” So, it was a very strange thing.
voidspace:
This is what I’m trying to achieve by stealth with the voidspace. I don’t think anyone’s noticed yet. When I get them all under one roof and make them do stuff they haven’t tried before and getting them talking to each other, they may notice.
Ivan Carić:
But it’s not just in this field. I think it is a feature of the modern world.
I mean, you don’t have very many polymaths. There’s a very good reason: these days, you need to have a huge depth of knowledge in whatever science or whatever subject actually it is that you’re actually dealing with. So that is your entire world. So, you don’t get as many people that have multiple skillsets.
“I did arts at school and therefore I didn’t do sciences and that I am the lesser for it. I have an interest in science and all the rest of it.” So, I mean, that’s a really crude example.
But I think also in academia you’ve got this empire building that goes on. I joke with Marianne, my partner, about it. She did a psychology degree, I did a sociology degree. Obviously social psychology has been stolen by psychology because it’s a science, obviously, and that’s nonsense, obviously. It’s just empire building terms colonising the space so that you are the experts in that space.
And it doesn’t mean that you don’t end up with this cross pollination, this gorgeous mixture where you take something from here and there and then something sparks and it comes together and you’ve done something genuinely magical and unique and new.
I think for all of the things that I have done wrong, and there are many things that I’ve learned, with Locksmith’s Dream, I think the reason why it’s this strange hybrid and it works. It works is because I’ve got these different backgrounds and I’ve approached it in a different way and that’s not right or the best.
There is a ton of stuff I’m still learning. I was 50 last year and it’s a bit sort of terrifying to be embarking on this whole new career. But it’s also fantastic because you are constantly learning and asking stupid questions of people. I was talking to the sound designer today and saying, “well, can we do this?”
And he replied, “this is not really thought-through yet, but I suppose we could, actually. Is there any reason?” And that’s wonderful. I mean, sometimes, obviously ideas are just stupid and they don’t work, but other times a different perspective does actually genuinely help.
voidspace:
I agree. I’m so much in favour of, especially in a creative space, creative cross-pollination, because I think we all have so much to learn from each other and I think people worry that if we share that it will somehow dilute the end product and it’ll be just a hodgepodge of everything.
But I think we have to be able to trust in the strength of our own voice enough to know that we can share and spark ideas from each other.
Ivan Carić:
At the end it isn’t as if your creative faculties are dulled by actually sharing or learning something else. Right? I mean, you’ll either like it and consider it to be good or not. And if it’s not, then you learn from it and you do something else, I guess.
voidspace:
I don’t know, actually, if mentioning unique creative voice is a good segue into something that I wanted to talk about, which is the uncanny in this kind of work and the approach that you’re taking to the uncanny.
Because I’ve seen a lot of immersive work that is horror based and that can often be a little bit of a blunt instrument. Sometimes it can be done very well. And I’m thinking about Parabolic’s Morningstar was a very good example of horror in the genre, done well.
But I think a lot of it can be quite hammy. How do you now, because what you’re describing to me, and I hope you don’t mind me phrasing like this, is a kind of immersive, interactive photorealism, almost. You’ve got this complete suspension of disbelief that can be achieved by having this very, very site-specific nature. And everything is done in a way that can bring the audience into this world.
How do you go about then introducing the Lovecraftian elements or the elements of the uncanny in a way that doesn’t break it?
Ivan Carić:
I’ll set out the problem. And then, Leo, you answer it, because the problem is this: we can’t send the guests mad. The insurance won’t cover sending guests mad, so we have to do it in a different way.
Leo Doulton:
So how do we do this thing?
I think you hit the nail on the head that there is a lot of really bad interactive, immersive horror because it is very easy to scare human beings.
We are fragile minds in suits made out of meat. It is quite easy to break them, and therefore they have a lot of instincts that are designed to make us avoid that fate. There is some really good immersive horror that understands the ways that you can actually quite subtly force people to confront something that is socially difficult.
There’s also some really bad immersive horror that thinks it’s doing that, but is mostly jump scares and so on.
This is a show rooted in a tradition of horror fiction, particularly focusing on the Dreamlands cycle, which is in some ways closer to the sort of blatantly orientalist, exoticizing the Middle and Far East, travelling narratives of HP Lovecraft and others, plus various other bits of weird fiction.
So the first thing is, of course, you’ve got to establish ‘normal’. You can’t do unsettling, you can’t do weird without people first understanding what is normal in the world of this show.
So that’s very much the first part of this is “there’s a guy who’s having bad dreams. It’s probably nothing.”
You’ve come to a show based on Lovecraft. You know it’s not nothing, but let’s all pretend we’re in the Woman in Black paradigm.
Voidspace:
You spend half an hour having a conversation and establishing what your norms are going to be before you break them.
Leo Doulton:
Exactly.
Then it’s to do with what can you do? Diegetically, of course, you’ve mentioned this photorealism concept, the idea that naturalism is the default theatrical form in our culture, which is absurd, but let’s not go into that.
I work in opera, for the benefit of the reader who doesn’t know that.
Voidspace:
I love it when you have Views.
Leo Doulton:
So first, of course, there is the diegetic stuff.
Actors can change how they present a character. You can also change aspects of the set. A wonderful thing that you can do, of course, in a 24-hour immersive show is that there are periods of time when rooms are empty, no audience members are there. That means you can change the rooms and really mess with the audience’s head. There’s stuff you can do with food if you’ve got a professional chef, and that’s really fun. And I’m not going to say any more than that.
Ivan Carić:
The set is also the outside, right? It’s the sky; it’s the sun goes away and it’s dark or it’s raining or any of these things, which then becomes part of atmosphere.
Leo Doulton:
I think the other thing to say is, of course, there are things that are non-diegetic, but audiences often treat as though they are diegetic.
For example, a soundscape in the background. We are all trained by movies from a young age to just tune that out. But actually, you can use that to add a sense of uncertainty.
You can also, of course, in this show, particularly because people are engaging with ‘there’s something weird in the house’, especially document-fragments of stories lying around, you can do stuff with that to try and ensure that it all comes together.
Suddenly the audience use that to – I use the phrase reify the external world. They make the external world seem real.
That suddenly means, sure, of course, you little human being, you can’t directly contact the supernatural because you’ve got a tiny mind made out of meat. However, you can read this account of it, which seems very convincing (because it’s beautifully written by Laura or me or other people in the team). Hopefully we’ll be able to achieve that.
And it is about being disconcerting and fundamentally understanding that horror is not about humans being scared, it is about humans being human. Sorry, this is me getting on my high horse. I’m going to lean into this. I was going to try and wrap up, but I’m getting on my high horse.
Horror is about humans being human in difficult situations which expose them for what humans are. It is usually a deeply pessimistic view of what humans are. Most horror believes, for example, if we are put in a stressful situation, we will eat each other.
Without wishing to be too blunt about it, that is a bullshit concept. That was very blunt. I can’t be much more blunt. It is a bullshit concept written by people who have never read accounts of human beings in extreme situations, what they actually do to try and take care of each other in extreme situations to keep each other alive. And I really get bothered by this because, as you know, Katy, I have a strand of work in Holocaust education. I have interests in various other horrors throughout history. And you read what people do in extremis.
It is bullshit that everyone is that selfish. Some people are, but not everyone. And therefore, a common strand in post-Lovecraftian writing, to bring it back to the show I am meant to be talking about, is that Lovecraft is a frightened man, that he is a bigoted man in many ways. He fundamentally believes you are alone in the universe.
And that’s probably because he more or less was. I don’t like to psychologise authors. He’s also just an author who believes that humanity will degrade in extremity, and it might be entirely unrelated to his terrifying biography.
But a lot of post Lovecraftian work, like Lovecraft County by Matt Revupp or The City We Became by Nicole Jemsin, very much emphasises “well, no, what if you did exist in a community of people who had learnt that in extremis you stand by each other?”
A lot of this show, I think, comes from that. To reunite the high horse with the show is the idea that you come here as a group of people who might be working together, you might choose not to.
That is a choice on the table, but by default it assumes that human beings are decent, if maybe unable to comprehend their nothingness in the universe.
And I maybe need to listen to less My Chemical Romance or whatever the emo kids are listening to nowadays.
Laura Langrish:
About making the uncanny, I think that partly links back to the site-specific nature of the show.
Like I said at the beginning, that the start point is to take the stories that we’re using from weird fiction, from Lovecraft, from Machan, and from those writers, take those stories, muddle them up, mess with them in a way that works for a story, and then specifically cite them in an existing history to the point that the uncanny becomes “well, I’ve read this, I know this is a story, but also it’s here and it feels real and it’s with real people. So, hang on, where does this experience stop being real life?”
And that level of uncanny, of bringing it all together to make the suspension of disbelief easy because you’ve got enough truth and reality with the fiction that it just feels real.
Ivan Carić:
Then finally, when you structure the show, the idea is that once you’re bought into that, you then have choices to make.
Obviously, given that this is Lovecraftian and it is uncanny, there are essentially bad consequences for all of them. It’s whatever the least-worst choice. And it’s which choices do you choose, informed by everything that you’ve experienced and read or spoken to people about?
Do you go with ‘because this is important to this particular character and you want to try and help them, even though something bad will happen on the back of that’, do you go with something else?
And this is where we are hoping that the structure of the show, to Leo’s original point, helps people come together. Ostensibly there is paranoia, and people can go off in different directions.
Leo Doulton:
And not necessarily to be paranoid.
Ivan Carić:
But by encouraging people to work together with some of these stories and then to have those sorts of debates and discussions about things that are obviously fantastical, but that then become real by virtue of the fact that they’ve read about them and experienced them and they happen in this place, but also the fact they’re actually talking about them, the fact that they’re debating a moral quandary about a lady that was locked in the attic or whatever, and there’s some sort of consequence they’ve got to decide ‘how does this story end? What’s the outcome and how are they informing that?’
I mean, it might be that some people are just very pragmatic about it and say, well, ‘obviously that’s not fair. So therefore, this is what needs to happen.’
But no, but there’s motive, there’s reason. Why did she do that? What was this thing that happened? Maybe she was dangerous, maybe all of this other stuff. So that will hopefully also feed into your original question, into the kind of the terror and the horror.
Because then it’s decisions that people are making, in which even the best decisions are potentially not necessarily that great. And so you have some culpability, you’re complicit in some way. And that also, I think, is horror.
voidspace:
Of the worst kind. I think that’s fantastic.
What I love about that is that I suppose we are used to certain scripts about horror and about weird fiction, about the uncanny.
And that often, I think, as Leo was touching on before, actually relies on people behaving in quite stylised ways or in accordance with certain tropes. As you’ve said, people not behaving as people. And yes, that might be as a result of poor assumptions made by the authors.
But also, I think there is a convention that’s played upon in, I don’t know, movies like Scream or something. There are certain tropes and certain conventions of how people ought to behave in these situations.
Taking people who actually are coming from the world and being encouraged to engage authentically with that world as themselves, that’s really exciting because you’re bringing authentic humans and bringing them in to the point where they can make authentic human choices within an uncanny setting.
And I don’t think anyone has really done that before. I think that’s really cool. There you go.
Ivan Carić:
Fingers crossed.
voidspace:
There was one question that I wanted to touch on, just because it seems to be a real hot topic in so many of the interviews I’ve had.
And it seems to be almost like we’re in the middle of a generational shift and you only notice a generational shift once it’s already happened.
But you notice the people that were starting to make this work 25 years ago, 20 years ago, were taking the potential of this mesh of the real and the unreal and exploring how it can throw us off balance, how it can plunge us in at the deep end, how it can unsettle us, how it can excite us, how it can raise our heartbeats.
What I think we’re seeing is a bit of a shift from the theatre of danger to what I’m terming the theatre of care. I think post-pandemic it might be a shift, or just with the state of the world in general.
I’m hearing people say, “actually, my heartbeat gets racy enough looking at the morning papers, when looking at my phone. I want something that’s going to put me into a different space when I’m doing theatre for fun.”
Obviously that’s an oversimplification, because I think you can create exciting experiences that are still fundamentally safe. Not always, but you can.
And you can still create soothing experiences that are fundamentally interesting.
But I would be very interested to know if you have a sense of where you fall on that scale, because I think it’s a really interesting discussion. But also, given that you are dealing with a sort of uncanny, weird horror, whatever you want to call it, in a 24-hour, inescapable, realistic setting, I’m very interested to hear about your safeguarding as well.
Ivan Carić:
Well, hospitality is a key part of it.
It’s something I think is often overlooked, but because you are fundamentally staying in a house, it’s got to be comfortable; it’s got to be a pleasant environment to be in.
Uncanny and growing strange, but fundamentally, you go to bed, you have some memories and some thoughts, but it’s got to be nice food. You can talk about experimental food and normal stuff, and we’ve got a fabulous chef, and a couple of chefs that have worked on this line.
But fundamentally, with food, the purpose is that you’re sharing food with other people, and it needs to be delicious. It doesn’t really matter how fancy or elaborate or strange elements of it are; it fundamentally needs to be delicious.
In order to have that feeling of danger, you need to also have a feeling of safety and of home. And again, there are other houses like this, but Treowen is a really strange place because I couldn’t ever afford to live in that house. It’s got 24 bedrooms or whatever. It’s this 17th century manor house.
But it feels strangely homely, despite the fact that it is really quite fancy. I think the safety and the homeliness is necessary so that you can push against that, or provide a contrast – to the point of things have to appear normal before you become abnormal.
Personally, again, this is me, I don’t really think this idea that you just push yourself into experiences because this is going to be uncomfortable, or it’s going to be dangerous. And therefore, I don’t really think that holds water for me because for me, because there’s got to be some element of enjoyment there as well.
I know exactly what the people that you’ve spoken to say, because I feel exactly the same. Maybe 20 or 30 years ago, I said, “no, well, that looks dangerous or really horrible or really horrifying. I’ll try that.”
But no, I mean, you need to have this baseline, and there are other ways to terrorise. But anyway, that was a very long answer.
But maybe someone else has got a thought.
Laura Langrish:
A lot of it is being aware of the kind of people that you’re going to attract to an experience like this, and with something that is interactive, theatrical, that’s based in weird fiction, the kind of people who are going to be interested are people who spend a lot of time in theatre or reading weird fiction.
As someone who loves that space myself, I know that we might not always feel that safe in society anyway. And I think, especially post-pandemic and that sense of isolation, a situation like this should bring people together.
It’s a small audience at most. If we sold all of the non-accommodation tickets, so the people who are non-resident in the house for the experience as well, there would still only be an audience of 30.
That’s a small group. You can be quite cohesive, especially when you come in ostensibly as a cohesive group, to work together. Even if there are options to split off and effectively become disparate groups, you’re still being tribal, you’re still working as a group together and looking after each other.
As strange as it is, and as unsettling as some of the narrative can be, the house is still a safe place for them to exist as people.
And although the stories will feel unsettling, at no point should you feel that you are threatened.
Ivan Carić:
That’s again, tied to the hospitality.
Briefly, there is a magic or a communal quality to breaking bread, to sharing food, to sitting down with other people, with strangers that become friends. There is something in that that I think is quite powerful and gives a feeling of safety and community in a way, which is a nice contrast.
Leo Doulton:
Something which I’d also throw into that notion of safeguarding one is that, yeah, the actor audience ratio really helps. But also, the guests eating together is a wonderful leveller.
The day I went to Locksmith’s Dream, Neil Patrick Harris was there. Noted Hollywood celebrity who obviously, in a nerdy crowd, lots of people recognise, because he fundamentally specialises in nerdy stuff.
He is, it turns out, a man who likes things that might be described as nerdy.
Obviously, I make no aspersion as to him, but because we were eating together and because this is a show which rewards investment in it, it was really interesting to see how, although I’m pretty sure 70% to 80% of that room did recognise him and the words “I’m trying so hard not to squee at him” were uttered.
But there were other people who were maybe better at certain types of puzzle, or people who learnt more about the characters. And fundamentally, we were eating together. And I don’t think anyone treated him any differently to just another person. Despite the fact that in terms of nerd social credit and, frankly, also ability with puzzles, he was also in very much the upper echelons of the group.
That’s a lovely feature of a show which is too big for anyone to have individual mastery. You’ve got to rely on other people, and also you get to watch them eat and occasionally leave the room. Y’know, humans have human stuff they need to do.
Laura Langrish:
Leo has been a big driver in this as well.
Something that we’ve taken from Locksmith’s Dream to bring across is that there really shouldn’t be one way to do it. There are different aspects to engage with.
But if you then are talking to people who’ve got a different window on the story, such as someone who has engaged with all the puzzles, because puzzles are their thing, and they’ve got lots of story and lore that they’ve unlocked through puzzles.
And someone else has thoroughly enjoyed racing around trails, running up and downstairs and all across the house to gather all the bits of story that are related to objects.
And someone else has just sat and talked to every character and gathered the bits that they know.
Well, when those three people then sit down together, they build a whole story. So there really is no right way because you can engage with it in any way you want.
We had people who arrived and said, but I want to do everything. You can’t, because it’s designed in such a way that there is so much out there. But even if you just engage with one part of it, you’d still have a good understanding of the story.
But then if you’ve put that together with someone else’s understanding of the story, then you get a wider and wider picture of the world in the same way that humans would in the real world. If you went to an event in the world, what one person got out of it would be something different from someone on the other side of the event. And afterwards, you’ve got a thing to talk about to fill out that whole world.
Leo Doulton:
Something which we’ve tried to do for that guest who wants to do everything:
You can do a bit of everything. It’s not the kind of show where you decide, “yes, I am a team blue person and I must do blue stuff for the rest of the day.”
You can very much turn up and do puzzles. You can do interaction with characters. You can maybe join one of the aforementioned secret societies.
And it’s very deliberately designed so that there are different levels of commitment required if, for example, like the Associate Creative Director of the company [Leo], you cannot do puzzles. That’s okay.
The Associate Creative Director has ensured that there are puzzles for people who can’t do puzzles because it makes me feel clever. So, it’s that kind of show as well. We want Ken’s Mum to be able to solve a puzzle and feel good about it.
Because of course there are other people who will turn up and then solve the really difficult one and that’s fun for them.
But also, if you want to just dabble in a bit of everything, that’s great.
Ivan Carić:
Without having to ring someone up and say, hello, can I have a clue, please? Because I hate that I’ve only done an escape room once and there’s bits I liked about it, but that I particularly didn’t like. It made me feel stupid.
voidspace:
I think that’s great, because it sounds like what you’re doing here is being very careful to do something that builds community. And there’s nothing like the right sense of community to help you feel safe, even when the world is going mad around you.
Ivan Carić:
And it doesn’t mean you have to like everyone, just to be clear again, because sure. That often feels saccharine. Community might be “Yeah, we know that guy over there. He’s just a bit dodgy.”
Voidspace:
I always say that if there isn’t gossip and shade throwing, it’s not really a community, it’s just a bunch of people together in a room.
To wrap up, I’ve just got one final question, which I ask everybody. So, Leo, I may be asking you this twice. I can’t remember if I was asking this when I interviewed you last time, if you had a piece of advice for-
Because the voidspace is as much about encouraging creation as it is about encouraging consumption. If you had any advice for aspiring creators in this, whatever it is, what would you say?
Leo Doulton:
You should find someone really, really rich who loves you.
Laura Langrish:
That’s good advice. We are not those people.
I would say work with others. Don’t try and be an entire universe to yourself. There is so much expertise out there that fills in the gaps that you don’t have and people are great.
Work with other people and share that knowledge and expertise because someone will give you a different view on it. That’ll throw things wide open.
Bringing Leo in. We worked together before; having Leo in the team has really grown what we’ve done, by having extra someone else to come at it from a different perspective and go “yeah, maybe don’t do that, but what about this?” And it’s been fantastic.
Leo Doulton:
Thank you.
Laura Langrish:
Find other people.
Ivan Carić:
I totally agree with that. So I can’t give that as an answer.
So I’m going to give a boring suggestion, which is that I think thinking about constraints- see, I sound businessy thinking about constraints – but thinking about the end result that you’re interested in is really important because often you start with “it has to be this, it’s got to be blue and it’s got to be pointy and it’s got to be made of painted wood, and it’s got all these particular attributes that I have to have in order for me to achieve this, whether it is, I don’t know, it’s presumably the same in opera or in theatre or whatever, this is how you do it.”
But if you break that apart and say, “well, what is the end result that you’re actually trying to achieve? Can you get most of that effect?” Not only does that help you with money, in that you can hopefully then do things cheaper, but also it helps in terms of the expertise that you need to have, in that it might be possible to do things quicker or easier.
So again, starting with the end result and then looking at constraints, trying to think of constraints as positive things, even though often they’re not, obviously.
Leo Doulton:
I have realised that, having listened to those answers, I actually have a good answer, because I think that the creative people really ought to know.
But also the thing that these two do, which is really, really clever and arts people never do, is they use project management software to distribute tasks among the team and make sure everyone knows what the heck is going on.
It is so useful; it has changed this project and we are producing a huge amount of work on a vastly more efficient timescale. And, oh my goodness, I’m using it for everything now. It’s so good.
voidspace:
Project management software. What a beautiful place to end it. Thank you.
Key of Dreams is now booking for September, October and December 2024. Find out more here.