DARKFIELD:

FLIGHT | COMA | EULOGY | ARCADE

Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

★★★★★

“meticulously crafted to mess with your senses”

Step into the void with a disorientating, immersive evening at ‘Darkfield’, where shipping containers conceal extraordinary secrets, and total darkness exposes more than you bargained for. Brace yourself – this pitch-black plunge isn’t for the faint of heart.

‘Darkfield’ delivers four mind-bending binaural journeys in total darkness. You can experience as many or as few as you like before regrouping at a central hub complete with beats and bar. My running order is ‘Flight’, ‘Eulogy’, ‘Coma’ and ‘Arcade’, which I recommend.

‘Flight’ kicks things off with a bang (literally). This is a flight simulator with a twist – think Schrödinger’s cat but with humans. The immersion begins the moment you’re handed a boarding pass, the plane cabin complete with overhead bins to stow your ‘luggage’. Screens spring to life for a pre-recorded safety briefing. Though the video keeps glitching – wait, why’s that face familiar? Then darkness. Take off is tricky, engines roaring and cabin quivering, and the higher you go, the stranger it gets – weren’t those curtains blue before? Bad weather looms – will you make it out alive?

‘Eulogy’ is a surreal, recursive dream (or nightmare) shaped by audience choices. We’re handed key cards to hotel suites… only to find ourselves in the loading bay. Lights out. A ‘companion’ lull us to sleep as we move through the hotel. Finally, our real rooms. Though be careful with that ornament, you don’t want to break it– a shattering crash ends your reverie. How will we get to the rehearsal like this? What if we miss the convention? But the endless hotel has other ideas, and you’ve more in common with the ornament than you realise.

‘Coma’ is the most disorientating of the four. Stepping into a room with floor to ceiling bunk beds, this is the only experience you take lying down. Your attention’s drawn to the pill by your head. Do you all take it and surrender to the collective dream? Or resist and tough it out? As darkness closes in, the smell of surgical spirit fills the air and… are we in a hospital? Who’s that pacing the corridor and why won’t everyone lie still?

‘Arcade’ is a darkly fun one to finish on. You step into an 80s arcade hall, controlling your destiny for the first time. Through a combination of button pressing and coin slotting, you guide ‘Milk’ through a choose your own adventure – though think fast, or Milk might die. Can you complete all the levels and win the game? And how many lives will you trade to get there?

Each experience is meticulously crafted to mess with your senses. The visual deprivation is almost total, with a few well-timed flashes made more jarring in complete blackout. The binaural soundscape feels real, the roving sound conjuring people and places with almost hallucinatory effect. The voice acting is expert, ranging from emphatic to conspiratorial. The other senses work overtime, deciphering scents, splats and puffs of air. The set and lighting design are flawless down to the last detail – whether it’s flight safety cards with mirrored reverses, housekeeping checklists on your laundry trolley, or arcade machines delivering gunshot recoil.

Each experience is wildly different, pushing the boundaries of theatre. ‘Flight’ is an immersive thought experiment that’s definitely not for nervous fliers – the plane looks real and soundscape features occasional screaming. It’s intense but thrilling. ‘Eulogy’ blurs the line between sleep and waking and keeps you guessing despite tailoring your experience. The journey is cryptic but captivating – just like sleep, it’s better not to fight it. ‘Coma’ is a dystopian brain melt, the binaural audio evoking multiple people. It’s utterly enthralling and worth persevering with, even if I find it the most unnerving experience. ‘Arcade’ is a great one to finish on, reasserting your agency even if it’s so you can die repeatedly. The staging is excellent with some shocking 4D effects. A post-show chat with the person next to me reveals wildly different stories – worth doing again! Though seeing all four shows in one sitting is hardcore and the upbeat DJ provides a very welcome buffer.

‘Darkfield’ is unforgettable, unnerving, and unlike any other theatre. It’s intense, unsettling, and probably not for everyone – definitely read the trigger warnings. But for those who dare, the reward is a breathtaking descent into a world that challenges reality.

DARKFIELD

Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

Reviewed on 9th October 2025

by Hannah Bothelton

Photography by Mihaela Bodlovic

DARKFIELD

Eulogy at Edinburgh Festival Fringe

★★★★

“Even the title should be enough to make your palms sweat”

If you’re up for a really different theatrical challenge, which includes sitting in pitch darkness for 35 minutes in a shipping container—I recommend Darkfield’s Eulogy. More diffident souls, however, may want to think a bit before signing up for this one. That’s not because Eulogy isn’t well done. On the contrary, it’s extremely well executed. It’s dark (literally), ironic, and deeply unsettling. The binaural experience of Eulogy is created in an environment that is completely devoid of any features that anchor you to the “real” world outside the shipping container. When they say you will be placed in utter darkness for 35 minutes, they mean what they say. And the headphones you wear will remove any sounds that could help orient you in a familiar world. For 35 minutes, you are about to embark upon a journey, in a mysterious hotel, completely dependent upon the guide they have assigned for you. And this guide doesn’t seem to know much about the place you are staying in.

Anxious yet? Because that’s the point with Eulogy. Even the title should be enough to make your palms sweat. If you are a more than normally anxious person, you probably shouldn’t sign up for this. But the Darkfield team is conscientious enough to ask you a few questions beforehand, and even give you a couple of ways of exiting this experience if it becomes overpowering. Because powerful Eulogy is. Starting with the “hotel suite” you are given when you enter the performance space. It’s not uncomfortable, and is perfectly fine for under an hour, but the cage that surrounds you might make you feel more like a factory farm chicken than a hotel guest. More anxiety. You’ll put on your headphones, and immediately hear the soothing tones of your personal guide, who promises she will never leave you. Uh huh.

If you haven’t exited by this point, you’ll be invited to close your eyes and try to sleep. Which is of course impossible with all the confusing sounds and contradictory instructions coming through your headphones. But that’s OK, because what’s cool about the binaural experience of Eulogy is the knowledge that no one in the shipping container with you, is having exactly the same experience. Directors David Rosenberg and Glen Neath have devised a piece where everyone ends up in more or less the same place. But it is the diversions, prompted by your “yes” or “no” answers to the questions in your headphones, that promise experiences rather different than say, all sitting together in the auditorium at the National Theatre. When the story is in the carefully curated sounds around you and your personalized response to them, then you become the star, as it were, of your own show. (Ably supported by the voice talents of Noa Bodner, Christopher Brett Bailey, Sonya Selva, Branden Burke, Rodrig Andrison, Dorothea Jones, Mélusine Lenoir and Nigel Barrett and others.) And yes, it’s easy to forget that there is a real world out there, because as the story progresses, in a very dreamlike way, it’s equally easy to forget who you once were. There’s probably a moral to all this forgetting, but I have forgotten what it was.

You’ll emerge from Eulogy a changed person. To say exactly how changed would be to give spoilers. So if you’re up for a performative experience quite unlike anything you’ve ever had before, go. But it’s a bit like getting on a roller coaster. You may love it, you may be uncertain about bits of it. But one thing is for sure. Once you commit, you’re on for the ride of a lifetime. Good luck!

Tag Archives: David Rosenberg

DARKFIELD

★★★★★

Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

DARKFIELD:

FLIGHT | COMA | EULOGY | ARCADE

Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

★★★★★

“meticulously crafted to mess with your senses”