Father Dagon
Dread Falls Theatre
The Basement @ The Island
Dread Falls Theatre, led by writer and director Victoria Snaith, carefully wound this mysterious and ghostly story through the gloomy, prison like hallways and rooms of the basement of The Island arts centre. It was the perfect location! This eerie tale, left its audience members feeling disturbed and on edge for their walk home through the dark streets of Bristol. Dread Falls Theatre have taken the terrifying tales of famous horror author HP Lovecraft and devised a truly captivating performance sure to chill you to the bone.
Immersive theatre as an art form can go one of two ways. It can be stripped back to basics where the audience have a completely free experience of what they can do, the most famous example of this being Marina Abramovic's Rhythm 0 in 1974, in which she stood silently for the duration as audience members were allowed to manipulate her using the good and bad props provided. Or it can be structured to tell several different story lines for audience members to choose, such as performances from companies like Punch Drunk who have been experimenting with this since 2000. Immersive theatre in its most basic form will always push the audience to think about their experience and give them a clear message. When telling a story through immersive theatre, I strongly believe each storyline/strand that the audience is able to view needs to be strong and make sense on its own and in the context of the overall performance. I loved the concept of this performance. However, due to projection issues with a few of the actors it was hard to hear some of the dialogue over the eerie and extremely effective sound scape from sound and sculpture artist Andrew Page. I also felt some of the dialogue too literal and over explanatory considering the style of the piece. Some memorable performances from Robb Wildash and Katheryn Brown (Assistant Director) their strand of the storyline was very strong and compelling, with some lovely use of contact improvisation and physical theatre. I look forward to seeing more from this company in the future and recommend seeing their current tour of Father Dagon.
My acting student notes:
I think a lot of their plot issues could have been solved with better projection, there was dialogue throughout, I just couldn't hear some of it. Good writing only refers to things if it is absolutely necessary to the storyline, there were a few names referred to by the actor playing Lovecraft but I struggled to hear why he was talking about them. I have since researched these names and now understand. However that didn't come across in the piece. I LOVE SOUNDSCAPING! Yet another production I have seen recently that has benefited massively from its use.
