“I want to make spaces where you can ask such a huge question as “How should you relate to your community, yourself, and your world?” And that is all embodied by talking to this weird supernatural being sitting in a circle that you have some sort of relationship to. And I think that allows beautiful things to happen.” Leo Doulton’s work often treads the line between beauty and terror, and his newly realised Uncanny Things trilogy is no different. Leo joins us in the Voidspace to talk about community, opera and why it’s really good to get a little weird sometimes.
Voidspace:
Hello, Leo. And welcome back to the Voidspace. Regular readers will know that you are a long standing friend of the void. However, today we are not here to talk about void things. We are here to talk about your thing. Why don’t you start off just by reminding us who you are and what you do in this space.
Leo Doulton:
Hi, I’m Leo Doulton. I am a maker of various types of interactive work, including interactive immersive opera, which is probably the most distinctive thing I’m known for. I also write interactive fiction, some of which is soon to be published with Voidspace Press.
Voidspace:
Rites of Angels – coming soon, summer 2025!
Leo Doulton;
Katy’s editing it!
Voidspace:
It’s going to be great!
Leo Doulton:
Well, that’s very kind of you. We may come to that later. I also support others to make interactive work through being Creative Consultant at Voidspace.
So, I do my own interactive-immersive theatre. I do interactive fiction. I also consult on other pieces of interactive theatre. And I’m associate creative director over at The Key of Dreams, which is the other big thing I do.
Voidspace:
People can read more about your work on Key of Dreams here and interactive fiction here and some discussion about your earlier work here.
But today we are here to talk about the Uncanny Things trilogy. First of all, I’d like to know…. What has inspired you to do interactive opera particularly? What can opera bring to interactivity and what can interactivity bring to opera?
Leo Doulton:
Like lots of people, I was first seduced into interactive theatre by Parabolic’s show Crisis? What Crisis? Which is a bloody fantastic show, in which you essentially simulate the late 1970s Labour government trying to keep out Thatcher. It’s tremendous fun. And I really enjoyed the fact that you actually got to be in the world.
I’ve also loved opera since I was a teenager. Opera is an art form where music allows you to reach for something beyond the everyday reality we live in. Opera does not remotely pretend to be realistic and I sat down for quite a while thinking, “how do you move these two things to be in the same orbit?” Because in interactive-immersive theatre like Parabolic you are normally yourself in a fictional world, but you are just you. You’re Katy, you’re Leo [other names are available].
Then I realised that I’m also really interested in the different ways people have justified the use of music and opera. And although nowadays a lot of it’s ‘the music is always there because we’re feeling big feelings’, like in Puccini and many other composers, right at the beginning, music is there to indicate that these people are gods, often Greek gods and that’s where the idea of Come Bargain with Uncanny Things came from.
The first part of this trilogy came into being by asking the question, “well, what if the reason for music here was that it was a ritual? What if the way we were communicating with the supernatural was through song?” The audience are still members of a local community because one of my big hobby horses I will probably ride later on in this interview is that interactive theatre is a form for building community in a lonely 21st century. We are a community in the show, and we have these specialists, these bargainers, who are here to negotiate with supernatural creatures. And the uncanny creatures don’t like normal voices. They don’t like mundane voices. So they ask you to sing if you are a bargainer (audience members tend to talk, unless they choose otherwise). And that then cascaded into Come Bargain With Uncanny Things.
Voidspace:
I like how, for this new generation of interactive work, the easiest way to start is often with quite a realistic setting. So the use of music is a way of bringing in that abstraction, that heightened sense in a way that sits alongside the realism.
Leo Doulton:
And hopefully in a way that doesn’t require too much knowledge. There’s a slight gap you have to overcome every time you have to use a special word. It’s like if you suddenly find yourself dropped into a fantasy novel and instead of the author saying “This is a sword”, you’re reading: “This is my Klinger”. It’s a sword. Just call it a sword.
Voidspace:
Tolkien has a lot to be held to account for. What people forget is that Tolkien was a linguist first and foremost. So of course that was going to be his interest. But it doesn’t have to be that way, guys.
Leo Doulton:
Yes. I have a strong preference for fantasy and sci-fi that doesn’t invent too many words unless necessary. As you say, music allows us to say we are not doing realism. Yes, you can negotiate this using your day-to-day social skills. But you don’t have to suddenly study a textbook. You’re just a person, who hopefully cares about your fellow human beings to some extent.
Voidspace:
It allows you to access another world whilst still being you. There’s been a lot recently in conversation about the identity crisis of immersive theatre and how there’s that kind of horrible dissonance, when the audience participant’s role is left undefined, or is defined in a way that won’t comfortably sit with audiences who don’t sit comfortably within certain parameters. I’d like to talk about the different ways in which the audience can interact as part of your work, and the kind of the inclusivity of it, because that’s something that always impresses me.
Leo Doulton:
Well, that’s very kind of you. I think for me, in interactive theatre, like all theatre – you can look at Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward as equally strong examples, or Chekhov – is usually attempting to communicate something to someone. And the first person we often are trying to communicate with is someone much like ourselves. And certainly the fact is that a lot of interactive theatre uses very traditional bourgeois settings – an office or a government space or a medical setting. These are the default imaginings, and one of the classic bourgeois imaginings is, of course, that you do a job which requires paperwork. You must be able to read and process information quickly and then deal with it. Obviously, that is not actually the sum total of human experience.
One of the ways in which we are human is that we are creative. So often what you will see in my shows is, for example, crafting tables – in Come Bargain With Uncanny Things you make offerings to win the Uncanny Thing’s favour. And that’s very much not about who is the best at drawing or knitting or origami – people invent all kinds of bizarre things – or writing poems. That’s because we are going to trust and value the fact that you are making something you think is beautiful, and that is echoed throughout the Uncanny Things trilogy. You make worship gifts for the Uncanny King in Come Worship our Uncanny King. In Come Murder an Uncanny Thing, you can give gifts, essentially, as a way of rejecting the Uncanny Thing in that piece. You can instead be going, “well, we’re going to make something that’s mostly about us, and you are receiving it, but it’s about what we want.”
Voidspace:
I really like that idea that whatever you are bringing as an individual is valued. There’s something about managing to make your audience feel valued, but without making them feel patronised. I like the way that the crafting piece can adapt to meet you where you are, because it’s coming from you, as a very personal exercise rather than a test of skill. It can accommodate all skill levels in a way that it’s harder to do with things that necessarily, for example, as you said, require verbal processing.
Leo Doulton:
Yeah. I mean, one thing I would love to see is someone in the interactive space who’s really, really good with mechanical devices, whether that is plumbing or clockwork or something, not just as a ‘can fix’ but a ‘can create/imagine’, and see them make a show where that is the focus. I am aware that, like many millennials, I am garbage at most manual tasks. But I suspect that could be a really interesting and fun way of interacting.
With Uncanny Things, a lot of it is also about community and it’s about keeping the stakes low. There are some interactive shows which are very much a game. There is a state you are trying to get to, and you are trying to win. In Uncanny Things, it’s really important that first off, the things you’re trying to do in any of the shows are defined by you as an audience member, and there might be something you’re superficially doing, whether that is worshipping the king or negotiating to solve problems for your community, or indeed trying to work out what you do when something has wronged your community. But ultimately, it’s not just that you are trying to achieve this goal, it’s you are trying to decide what this goal ought to be. How do you occupy that space? How do you answer that question?
Voidspace:
This work lends itself, if it’s handled well, to building communities, both kind of what I call the community in the moment, which is the way that people are brought together during the show. But also a lot of people find themselves compelled to talk about it afterwards, to write about it on the internet, to seek out other people, to share their own experiences. What is it in your shows that makes that community cohere?
Leo Doulton:
So there are things that are deliberate and things that are accidents, and things that I learned by accident along the way and now are deliberate. You were talking about how a lot of interactive shows seem to struggle with genuinely trusting their audience. And I think a big part of that is you’ve got to have facilitators who are comfortable trusting; who fundamentally, when push comes to shove, believe that humans are trying to be decent 99% of the time.
Yes, it is important in rehearsal to go through “what do we do if someone turns up and is genuinely just trying to spoil everyone else’s evening?”. But ultimately, most people, particularly in something like Uncanny Things – where the focus is on “How can you be a member of your community? What do you do here?” – they will try and be a good human being. And if you treat them with love as best you can. And yes, sometimes, you know someone’s had a bad day or isn’t being everything they want to be, but you can achieve beautiful things.
The other things we do are more practical. We very deliberately go “some of you have a worthwhile task, which is circulating information around”. It’s not that you sit down and you only talk to the people sitting at the table with you. It’s that you are encouraged to go and relate to other people.
We also mechanically design it so that you can’t just do it by yourself. You can’t just sit there making offerings without being aware of what potentially someone else is going to ask the Uncanny Thing to do, and therefore there’s a design incentive to cooperate and build community.
And so in short, the people help, the mechanics help and also the premise helps, of course, that in all three of these shows, you are being asked to support and represent your community, and therefore you are told these people are your neighbours. These people have all chosen to be here. And we try to make sure that the moment you walk through the door, you are treated with that level of care and respect. And that really helps as much as anything else. You can’t actually do anything wrong. You can do things that are unwise, but you can’t do things that are wrong.
I have been to interactive shows where it’s sort of, if you do the wrong thing, then horrible evil will fall upon London. This is not that show. Yes, that might happen, but you haven’t done the wrong thing. You’ve just made choices.
Voidspace:
I suppose at the heart you’ve got a communal objective which is quite gentle. Something that I think is very special about the trilogy is the use of song because – and I’ve seen this in other work of yours as well – what actually happens is that the audience are working together to build the scaffold of the show, of the atmospherics.
Leo Doulton:
I don’t know. I mean, something deeply fucking weird exists and it’s called opera and one of the weird things about opera is that when a character sings on stage, I’m going to use, La Bohème as an example, because it’s a reasonably well known opera. Let’s face it, if any opera is very well known, La Bohème is very well known. And in it you have a bunch of Parisian bohemians wandering around feeling big feelings, falling in love, screwing it up. And very much when someone sings that they are sad, your body is literally vibrating with it. That is how opera works. That is how music works. And that is why music creates this sense of shared connection when we all do it together. Of course, we then sync up with each other, and Uncanny Things then takes a step further.
Someone said, this is not opera because this is drama with song, not drama through song. And I would strongly contest that. You can read about it on my blog, because I really love this review, and it was a very sensible point to make but that applies only to a specific subset of opera.
I would argue in Uncanny Things, what we’re doing is saying the music is designed to reflect the world. If the audience in, for example, Come Worship Our Uncanny King, if they particularly pleased the King, that is going to lead to a different sound world than if they anger the King. And constantly, what the audience are doing is then going to influence the music around them, and they might not be consciously aware of that.
I hope nobody’s sitting there thinking, “oh, the music is a bit more discordant, and therefore it is going to be like so, as the wyrd is rising.” Because that would be terribly fucking dull. That they should be, however, sitting there thinking, “oh, I feel a little bit more on edge. I feel like something’s going wrong in the world” is exciting. And that’s because whatever they’ve just done has made there be more magic in the world. It also allows us to make the magic feel real. When you do your ritual, you suddenly hear the music and world shifting around you. That’s exciting.
And as you say, we do have elements where either the audience are asked to make some sort of sound contribution, like we often vote through humming, or a lot of audience members do decide that occasionally they do want to sing, especially when addressing a supernatural creature, and that’s lovely because you have these people who will come up and they’ll apologise before they start singing. And it’s like, you don’t need to! You are a full grown adult singing in public. What a wonderful thing to do!
Voidspace:
Let’s talk about power. Obviously, there are three parts to the trilogy. That’s traditionally what makes it a trilogy. You have Come Bargain with Uncanny Things where the uncanny thing is basically held in a circle, and we are bargaining with it. You have Come Worship Our Uncanny King where the uncanny thing is now in a position of power over you. And you are trying to gain its favour. And then the third you’ve got is Come Murder An Uncanny Thing where… I’m not entirely sure what happens in that, because I don’t think it exists yet. It will by the time this is published. It does exist? It does exist! Oh! That’s exciting.
Leo Doulton:
I finished the bastard.
Voidspace:
That’s fantastic. And you are indeed deciding whether to finish the bastard.
Those shifts in the balance of power and hierarchy really interest me. I find it really interesting that something deals with the uncanny, which is a very shifting and fluid space, expresses it through such fixed ideas of hierarchy anyway.
Leo Doulton:
So, as you have noted in other contexts, I am very interested in power. I think power is a thing that exists in a lot of human relations, whether that is at vast historical scales (I did a history degree), or indeed at an interpersonal level and in a lot of interactive shows, because of the audience agency, the audience by default, have power.
Initially Come Bargain with Uncanny Things was made as a standalone show in which the question was, “how do we relate to the Uncanny Thing?” which more or less stood in as a metaphor for “how do we relate to the world and to each other?” Because the Uncanny Thing exists in a slightly metaphorical vein, people liked that show, and I liked that world, and I liked the way it explored that question. And initially I didn’t really want to do more with it. And then the idea of Come Worship Our Uncanny King and Come Murder An Uncanny Thing came in.
What happens if instead of having this equal negotiation, as you said, there is an Uncanny Thing that has power over you? How do you relate to, for example, climate change? How do you relate to a tyrant? What do you do in that situation? Or indeed in Come Murder, what happens if something is just at your mercy? What happens if you can control the environment around you, whether because you are a human being who has another human at your mercy, or if you are a human who, just by virtue of living in a wealthy capitalist society, has the ability to manipulate your environment, and the working conditions of millions. Of course you can tear up the earth and take the minerals from inside it. Of course you can have a phone and a chocolate bar produced with child labour on another continent. That’s the way we live. That’s capitalism.
So I think the thing it does is if you have Come Bargain by itself, I think it’s just about okay, because it allows the audience to feel their status shift. If you just had Come Worship or if you just had Come Murder, on the other hand, I think those two things offer a slightly misleading idea of what it is to be human.
To be human is to exist in a vast network of relationships, some of which you have power and some of which you don’t… often you want that power, it’s negotiated. And often power is about wanting something which you may or may not be able to have. Trying to decide what you’re willing to do within that context is often something that allows you to make interesting choices that feel significant to you and to your community.
In Come Worship Our Uncanny King’s test at 2024’s Voidspace Live, it was delightful seeing how some people absolutely would just do what the King wanted, because they wanted to be loved by something with power regardless of how likely it seemed that that thing could love you. That sort of tension, I think, can lead to really beautiful moments and heartbreaking ones as well.
Voidspace:
I was sorry not to see that – the Void In Chief gets busy during the festival – but how was that as part of the process? How did you go about developing something this scale?
Leo Doulton:
In stages. I’m going to start at the beginning, very quickly, because Virtually Opera had a show before Uncanny Things called We Sing/I Sang, which was increasingly interactive opera across three short runs 2019-2020. So praise be to small London fringe festivals. Then Come Bargain appeared in summer 2021 for a test show, the Britten Pears Foundation gave me a residency in early 2022 to develop it, and then COLAB hosted it at the tavern for a proper run that November.
Which is to say, it takes years to develop even just one of these shows. And afterwards, I was out of energy to use that momentum. Which was a mistake, but I had other work and things happened. Perhaps mid-2023, the niggling thought of these other shows emerged after people kept asking, but the idea of doing the Trilogy without testing anything was… just financially, a huge risk, let alone the creative side of things.
Voidspace offered a chance to test the show with an audience who definitely wanted to be there. Because with Come Worship, the big question was whether this was presented as horror (you are being subjugated by the King) or comedy (this world is absurd, and you must survive in it somehow). The team saw the latter option clearly, well before I did. But Voidspace was a space of joy and risk that really led to a clear vision: all three shows have a distinct and different tone.
Worth saying with my Voidspace hat on: if you want a safe, supportive environment filled with people who will understand interactive work, and want to love it, to test your interactive work, applications are open for the next Voidspace Live.
Though all the stuff I’ve spoken about here is genre-based, it really does take all sorts.
Voidspace:
What draws you to using genre, and particularly weird horror, in your work?
Leo Doulton:
So I think the thing genre does in interactive is it steps you out of the real world for a second. If I said to you, here is a show about the question “How should we relate to the natural world and our community. We are a community living in a village and climate change is causing the seas to rise. What should we do?” you are going to bring in a whole bunch of ideas to that show because of the premise.
Voidspace:
I’ve seen that show. It wasn’t very good.
Leo Doulton:
It’s been done so many times and I’m sure someone’s done it really well. Similarly, any version of that question in our real world is going to become an answer to that specific question, which is really a good thing to do.
But for me, I want to make spaces where you can ask such a huge question as “How should you relate to your community, yourself, and your world?” And that is all embodied by talking to this weird supernatural being sitting in a circle that you have some sort of relationship to. And I think that allows beautiful things to happen. It’s not a complex answer. I like metaphors, that’s why I like genre fantasies.
Voidspace:
I don’t think we see enough metaphor in immersive.
Leo Doulton:
I would actually push back on that. I think a lot of commercial immersive has a lot of metaphors, but doesn’t doesn’t want to acknowledge what the metaphor is.
Voidspace:
How so? Give me an example.
Leo Doulton:
For example, many immersive shows don’t want you to question the status you have in that world. They want you to believe it is your right, based on what you have done, to have whatever status you have. They want you to be justifiably important or powerful or influential, and they’re not going to say to you, the reason you have this power and influence is because you can afford to pay £100 for your ticket or indeed in some cases, the reason you have more power and influence than that person is you can afford to pay £200 for your ticket, and they only paid £100. That is a vast fucking assumption about the world. That is a metaphor, it’s just not a metaphor that’s very nice or fun to look at.
Voidspace:
See, I’d push back on that and say, I’m not sure that that’s a metaphor. I think that’s just an unfortunate, uninterrogated political assumption. I suppose if you say that your work isn’t political, it probably is. It’s just that you’ve not really come to grips with that.
Leo Doulton:
I suspect more. What I mean is that there is also a fictional justification for this, but it’s usually quite flimsy. It’s: “You are the sort of person who is going to be in our special task force”, or whatever.
Voidspace:
You have found a far more elegant way of doing that, but also a way to make people feel powerless in a way that is still satisfying, because a lot of immersive experiences, even really good ones, do tend to rely on a kind of a power fantasy at the core of them, that we can absolutely be important and make a difference and do good things. And it’s interesting to see work that challenges that assumption. But how you do it without upsetting your paying audience is the question.
Leo Doulton:
I think the main thing is most people feel powerless in some way. I have had bizarre conversations with people who are phenomenally rich and phenomenally powerful. I remember a couple of conversations with quite senior donors to various opera companies who clearly still feel like they are not secure and not quite comfortable with what they have.
And to me, ultimately, all we’re doing with compassion is saying it’s okay to be that – you don’t have to be all powerful. In fact, this world is very comfortable with saying to you, you’re not all powerful, and you’re still a human being. And that’s something we’re going to respect and love. The Uncanny Things, all of them, are obsessed with what it is to be human, because they’re not, and even if the human characters might occasionally go, “you’re not the sort of human I like hanging out with”, the Uncanny Thing will go “I don’t care if the way you are human is that you just want to be by yourself.” If you want to sit here silently with me, that’s great. I’ll take it.
Voidspace:
Tell me a little more about the fact that you have made a whole Uncanny Things trilogy.
Leo Doulton:
The only example I can immediately think of, of an interactive show with multiple parts, is Parabolic’s For King and Country…
Voidspace:
I’m also thinking of the original Bridge Command, which was five or six episodes.
Leo Doulton:
Both by the same company. I think what those shows did really well is they gave you a sense of continual narrative for yourself as the protagonist through episodes of a story, and that is phenomenal. And I wish I’d seen either of those shows.
With the Uncanny Things trilogy, it being a trilogy allows you to explore these three very different interpretations of the same world. What is it to be in the world when you have equality, power and the lack of power? These are not consecutive stories as such. They are three slices of the same world, which is a world which is much like our own, but uncanny supernatural things happen around you.
We noticed that as we did the original Come Bargain with Uncanny Things, guests also came in with wonderful ideas and we would often start to incorporate them. There was one show where someone said, “oh yes, I saw some weird dogs on the way here” and that just suddenly emerged into the narrative: suddenly there were weird dogs that needed dealing with in the area and that was wonderful.
What we’re doing with the trilogy from a purely narrative side of things is that if the community – combined with Uncanny Things – do something to make the supernatural more powerful in their community, or they build a large, beautiful tree in their world, the Uncanny King in Come Worship Our Uncanny King may well know that that may be a thing. The Uncanny King pulls it into its own kingdom. There’ll be ongoing impacts. And if you come back as a community member, it’s not going to be that we’re just going to pretend that you haven’t been to the show before. It’s going to be, “oh, Katy, thank you so much for coming back as a bargainer, that’s really appreciated.”
If you go to Come Bargain with Uncanny Things and then later on Come Worship Our Uncanny King, the King might go, “oh, you’ve been to a bargaining ceremony. That’s very interesting to know. What did you do at your bargaining ceremony?”
You become part of an ongoing world because, of course, you keep having to bargain. Of course, one of the big things in this world is that this sort of ritual is a normal, almost mundane part of life that you just have to deal with. The fact is that there are supernatural monsters in the sewer, so someone has to do something.
Voidspace:
Just like a local council meeting that comes around every now and again.
Leo Doulton:
We have so much local council bureaucracy. There’s even a council representative.
What guests bring to the narrative will continue to ripple through. They will be able to come back again and again. Even in Come Murder an Uncanny Thing, you can come back. If you just come to that show, people will judge you, but you can come and murder an uncanny thing repeatedly and we’ll see what happens. And you probably will be mentioned in another show as, “oh god! There’s this guy who really likes killing things!”
Voidspace:
It’s the one episodic show that you can actually do out of order. And that would actually be quite fun in a horrific sort of way.
Leo Doulton:
And then, of course, thematically, my hope is that by having that interrelationship between the shows, you start coming up with what our community of audiences think of as the answers to these questions – how do they want to relate? How you deal with what people before you have done is a deeply human question.
I mean, you know, yes, fine, the world did not spring into being when I was born, and it will not cease when I die, and I think having that sense is going to be really exciting. You’re leaving something for someone else to deal with. It’s not just that you can end the world at the end of your show, because if you do, that’s someone else’s problem.
Voidspace:
I like that a lot. Talk about extending the metaphor.
Leo Doulton:
I’ve only realised that just now, Katy. But yes, that is a thing we’re doing.
Voidspace:
What have you just realised just now?
Leo Doulton:
That we are doing a show where, because it is iterative and ongoing, one of the big questions we’re asking the audience is “what do you leave for those who come behind you? What do you do with those who came before?”
Voidspace:
We’ve talked loads about the community in the moment that the Uncanny Things trilogy will create, but you are building your own out of show community as well. Obviously some shows that have had longer runs or have built online fandoms and things, but you have picked up that baton and run with it through your crowdfunder, and the crowdfunder community events that you’ve been running as well.
Leo Doulton:
It’s lovely to have interactive theatre fans and opera fans all coming together, whether that’s from the horror end or the arts and music end. One of my favourite things has been that we have a monthly tabletop roleplaying game session with some of the crowdfunder backers, and that is generating knowledge of the world, which is going to feed into the shows, because I think that’s a fun thing to do.
Voidspace:
Generative plot building. That is such a great idea.
Leo Doulton:
It’s genuinely an absolute fucking delight. They’re lovely people. And obviously for a show about community, being funded by our community just makes sense. It works really nicely for us.
Voidspace:
This all connects quite well to your forthcoming book, Rites of Angels, that we will be releasing through Voidspace Press this summer.
Leo Doulton:
That is a book that is absolutely about craving something you can’t fucking have. It is about the absolute absence of power before something that you just want to be joined with, and you can read it as being about love. You can read it as being about politics. You can read it as being about the environment. Ultimately, what it is, is about some people who are destroying their human relationships in order to try and get something they can’t have and I hope you agree with that because you’re publishing the bastard..
Voidspace:
Yes, I do. Very nicely put.
Leo Doulton:
I’m very much looking forward to that being in a closer state to publication, because it’s really cool and I’m excited to be sharing it.
Voidspace:
Have your recommendations for other makers changed?
Leo Doulton:
So I think the last things I recommended were…I can’t remember… lots of money?
Voidspace:
Someone with lots of money, who loves you.
Leo Doulton:
Yeah. Find someone with lots of money who loves you. And I think I recommended something else before. So, a third recommendation. I think beyond the basics, which everyone has covered, is to go and consume lots of different media. It’s to try and find different ways to be a body in a space as a human being.
When you’re making work, just try and ask yourself, “What can a body be doing in this space that it might not normally get to do? And how can I help that to happen safely and comfortably?” And you will often find some really interesting questions about who is in your world, and how are they being in it. Whether that’s going dancing or hiking, or maybe eventually I’ll learn how to do plumbing, but all of these things can be really wonderful ways to invite your audience to just enjoy being alive a little bit.