Welcome to the office of Dr. Ligotti. You are his patient, in therapy for your vivid nightmares. Or are you the participant in an experimental immersive experience? The Manikins: a work in progress is NOT a work in progress. It is an hour long performance by two actors for you, its single audience member and protagonist. It is a labyrinthine conspiracy, a cold war between dream and reality, a constantly transforming psychedelic world that slips like sand between your fingers. Seize it while you can.
The gateway drug to my escape room addiction was immersive theatre. It started with a performance of Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man in London and escalated from there, growing to encompass all types of immersive entertainment from the mainstream spenny spectaculars of Secret Cinema to the more avant-garde fringe experiences, including one that made us dress in sou’westers and gave us shots of rum while spraying us with water. Escape rooms definitely scratch the immersive itch but I still get pulled back to the form that drew first blood, theatre.
What I’ve mostly avoided, however, is that type of immersive show that puts the spotlight on the audience member. Part of my huge love for Punchdrunk is the ability to get lost behind their trademark masks, to be a voyeur in their world without being seen, to move amongst the performers with anonymity. I’m much more comfortable expressing myself in the written word and went put on the spot to speak in any public setting, I turn into something of a gibbering, inarticulate puddle. So when rumours about The Manikins: A Work in Progress from Deadweight Theatre started to trickle down the immersive grapevine, my initial reaction was nope, not for me. It is a show that has just two performers and one audience member and there is nowhere for that audience member to hide. No mask, no dark auditorium, no horde of other immersive thrill-seekers to disappear behind. And besides being visible, you also have to actively participate. The mere thought of which sent shivers down my spine.
!!BE WARNED: THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD!!
!!PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!!
But FOMO is an irresistible force and as the rave reviews for The Manikins continued to multiply, I let that FOMO outweigh my FOP (fear of performing). So one sunny Sunday afternoon in August I found myself on the grass outside the Kingswood Arts Centre in Sydenham Hill wondering what the actual hell I’d let myself in for. The building itself is intimidating – known locally as Bovril Castle as it was once owned by the inventor and King of Bovril, John Lawson Johnston – it’s a solid mass of stone now housing a local arts charity. But its solidity belies the ephemeral, will-o-the-wisp, difficult-to-define experience that takes place within.
Blurred Lines
The Manikins is a show built on shifting sands, deliberately blurring the lines between reality and artifice, forever wrong-footing the audience member. Even pinpointing when the show starts is seemingly impossible – you’re greeted outside and taken through the building to the performance space through the ‘back stage’ area where you can see costumes and props and where you’re, unusually, introduced to the stage manager. An introductory chat from Jack, the writer/director/performer, establishes the ‘work in progress’ nature of the performance, sets a few rules and allows you to ask questions, but is this genuine pre-show prep or are we already inside the show? Is Jack who he says he is? Am I already performing a role without knowing it? Even now, over a week later, I don’t have a definite answer to those questions.
Puzzling Choices
What follows is a Chinese puzzle box of a show. You’re told you’re here to visit a therapist, Dr Ligotti, to discuss your nightmares but before you even meet the good doctor, a mysterious envelope is slipped discreetly in your direction. Inside a partial page of script. As you step into your initial scene, you have a choice. Do you follow the script or not? Regardless of the choice made, the narrative soon starts to slide and slip in surprising directions. Moments are repeated, dialogue changes places, facts confirmed once are overturned only moments later, characters who seemed trustworthy once now seem to have agendas of their own. The show starts to layer over itself, each new take on the same moment slides over the one before, disorienting the audience member, shifting the solid ground of therapist/patient dynamic beneath their feet.
The result is unsettling and intense. The audience member cannot be passive, they are drawn into the complexity of the shifting layers and need to be focused and attentive, retain things they’ve been told even when they start to wonder if they were actually told things or imagined them. I am pathetically forgetful and found the test of my recall stressful, even having to stupidly admit at one point that I couldn’t remember what I’d been told to do or even if I had actually done it. I lived in perpetual fear of ‘getting it wrong’ but even in the midst of the show I had huge respect for the performers who could steady the ship even when this particular passenger looked set to steer way off course.
Dream or Reality?
Layers of narrative continue to glide and slither over each other, and it’s fairly early on that you lose the thread of where the line between reality, show, dream and nightmare stands. Occasionally you’re tugged out of the ‘play’ world but even then you realise you’re still inside the performance, that the actors are performing even when they’re not. It’s almost impossible to describe how disorienting this is – the normal them/us relationship between audience and actor disintegrates, making you both complicit and powerless. Do our choices make a difference? Does the line we take change the narrative path or outcome? Did my curiosity about what happened next if I opted to dive back into the story, really leave a character trapped in an infernal loop. I’m really not sure. And I think that’s ok. This isn’t a show that ties itself up with a neat little ribbon at the end. As I left Bovril Castle, strolling back to the solidity of the local train station, I wasn’t even sure if it was all actually over. Maybe it never is.
As all of the above will have made abundantly clear this is a piece of theatre that is tricksy to define, explain or describe. I left the performance bemused and not entirely clear if I’d enjoyed myself or not. But for hours and days afterwards, I kept returning to different parts of the experience, unpicking it and re-exploring it, realising as I did so how impressively clever the whole thing is. Two performers, one audience member, a small black box space, limited costumes and props, might suggest simplicity, but The Manikins is anything but. It’s a complex, twisting, bewildering, stressful, intense, insane, multiverse of a ride. And for this escape room addict a satisfyingly challenging Chinese puzzle box that I’ll keep turning over in my mind for a long time yet.
The Manikins: Work in Progress runs for selected times of the year. You can find out more on their website here.
All photos in this review by The Manikins: Work in Progress.
