“Sleep, those little slices of death. How I loathe them,” Edgar Allan Poe is rumoured to have said. Sleep – the nightmarish descent into the netherworld – underpins the Australian theatrical extravaganza A Midnight Visit.
The show, a collaboration between Broad Encounters and Groundswell Productions, sells itself as “Australia’s first large-scale immersive experience” in the vein of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, a take on Macbeth that has been taking over the McKittrick Hotel in New York since 2011.
The Australian iteration weaves both biographical details and characters from Poe’s literature into a vast, sprawling shindig, which takes place in more than 30 chambers spread across two floors in an abandoned warehouse in Sydney’s Newtown.
Rather than a linear storyline, the audience gets to solve puzzles and choose their own path through the orchestrated mayhem. Let loose in this massive House of Horror – where there are hidden tunnels, secret cells, and a liberal spraying of body parts and blood – visitors can explore the plethora of rooms, where actors play out various scenes and occasionally pull their audience out of the action for one-on-one experiences.
With more than five hours of scripted work spread across different evenings, directed by Danielle Harvey (formerly of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas), no two nights are the same. And as with Sleep No More and London’s smash hit Secret Cinema – not to mention the growing trend both here and abroad for escape rooms – A Midnight Visit is answering a growing call from audiences eager to put down their iPhones and engage in the (bodily) world.
On this level it succeeds: the exploration factor in the impressive, imaginative set, with sound design and composition by video-game creator Peret von Sturmer, is a treasure-trove of fun – even if it borrows heavily from its influences and contemporary art itself. (One room featuring a giant spider’s web, with white paper caught up in the tangled string, is nearly identical to Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota’s installation work; another, which shows video screen close-ups of licking tongues and gaping mouths, could have been lifted straight from the recent Pipilotti Rist exhibition, Sip my Ocean, at the MCA).
As theatre, however, the night lacks both coherence and any real emotional impact. Most of the time I felt I was skimming along the surface, bobbing on a sea of loosely connected action that was frivolous and flighty, rather than frightening.
What does work is the surprise factor (beware: there are spoilers ahead). A very slight storyline sees Edgar Allan Poe, played by James Raggatt, sporting a nifty little moustache and the look of someone who has just seen a ghost, travel through his own dreamscape. Downstairs, where disease plagues the populace, is a Victorian-era world, featuring a hospital, theatre, and stuffy old drawing room. Upstairs, the surreal takes over: here, we visit Poe’s interior mind, a labyrinth of lucid dreaming.
Joining Poe are a bunch of outlandish characters. There’s his wife Virginia (Bobbie-Jean Henning), who Poe married when she was aged just 13 and who died at 24 from tuberculosis; she haunts his memories, dressed in a virginal white wedding dress, coughing up vermillion coloured blood. There’s a power-hungry king; an actress desperate for an audience; and a raven who – wearing a sinister bird mask – provides the kiss of death.
References to Poe are ample but, with scarce signposting in the script, would only be recognisable to those who know his work well. The mad king, boastful and arrogant, talks of burying a woman under the brickwork – a nod to Poe’s 1843 short story The Tell-Tale Heart, in which the narrator murders, cuts up and buries an old man, and to The Premature Burial. In another scene, Madeline Usher, from Poe’s novel The Fall of the House of Usher, takes a bath in a church filled with neon pink blow-up balls, all the while laughing maniacally. Then of course there’s The Raven, from Poe’s poem of the same name.
A Midnight Visit should be commended for giving immersive theatre a red-hot go, for its bold aspirations (the production, even if it does not always succeed, thinks big and is entirely self-funded) and for breathing life into a characterful old building that will soon be knocked down and turned into luxury flats. Sydney needs more of this kind of ambitious, grassroots art.
Yet I couldn’t help but feel like we were a bunch of tourists shuffling, en masse, through a theme park. Given that A Midnight Visit draws on the grandfather of gothic horror for inspiration, it was more kitsch than macabre, silly than scary.
At the start of the evening, our guide tells us: “Refrain from speaking: screaming is permitted.” For me, it was an empty warning. This was a show with more style than substance.
• A Midnight Visit runs in a warehouse on King Street in Newtown until December
