Visitors
Online from 6th October via Darkfield
Reviewed – 2nd October 2020
★★★½
“It would make a brilliant beginning to a socially-distanced Halloween event”
Visitors is a short audio-immersive experience created for two people to share, each with a smartphone and headphones. There is an app to download and an access code to type in and the audio has been created to experience at home.
The tech all ran smoothly other than a slight hiccup at the very beginning: there is a clock countdown on the phone screen, which creates a certain amount of anticipation, and it was therefore very anti-climactic when nothing happened immediately on 0. There were a few minutes of dead time before the experience actually kicked in, which definitely took away from it somewhat. Given that this was a press preview however, there is every chance that this technical glitch will have been addressed before the experience goes fully live. Once it did actually begin however, it very quickly became completely absorbing, partly owing to the instruction to turn off all the lights. The sound quality was extraordinary and extremely unsettling. My son and I each had physical responses to it at certain moments, with the hair on my arms quite literally standing on end at one point; excellent vocal work from the two actors, Sonya Seva and Greer Dale-Ffoulkes, also perfectly conjured up an eerie, ethereal virtual space.
The narrative is slight, and the experience would benefit from being a little longer, but if you’re someone who enjoys a bit of titillating fear, Visitors most certainly fulfils the brief; it’s rather like a super high-tech 2020 version of a ghost train. It would make a brilliant beginning to a socially-distanced Halloween event, and is clearly an ingenious way to deal with the current COVID restrictions.
It’s certainly no substitute for live performance, but there’s clearly a future in this 21st century method of storytelling. It will be interesting to see (hear?) other, perhaps more complex, types of tale told in this way.
Reviewed by Rebecca Crankshaw
Visitors
Online from 6th October via Darkfield
Previously Darkfield review:
Darkfield: Séance – Flight – Coma | ★★★★ | King’s Cross | February 2020
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