Guest Blog: 'How do you create a 24-hour interactive immersive show where the guests can do anything?': Lemon Difficult's Laura Langrish on Key Of Dreams

Immersive theatre comes in all shapes and sizes. The Key Of Dreams from Lemon Difficult is a 24-hour experience which invites guests to explore a 17th century manor house. Inside is a cornucopia of mysteries revealed through stories, puzzles and a cast of intriguing characters. How, though, are the actors prepared for a role in this unique production? Lead writer Laura Langrish fills us in.

"A guest walks down the steps towards a locked wooden door. As it opens before them, they discover a room without colour in which a strange ritual is taking place."

"But what if they don't? What if they try to stop it? How do you create a 24-hour interactive immersive show where the guests can do anything?"

When we started to work on The Key of Dreams, we started with horror and ghost stories from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Our passion is for telling stories and to play with the ways in which people engage. To give our audience the choice to move from listeners and observers to active participants within the developing narrative without railroading them. Our goal is to create delightful moments of emergent experiences unique to each show.

While this is partly achieved through a great location and the exploration of deconstructed narratives, the heart of the experience comes from the fantastic actors who we work with. With experience in everything from traditional and immersive theatre, but also adjacent disciplines of traditional storytelling, historical interpretation and game design our ensemble thrives on their range of talents. But working with Lemon Difficult is no ordinary task. I will never forget the look on actor Emily Carding’s face when instead of a script, they were presented with a 40 page document and spreadsheet!

So what do they get instead of a script? Their character has a clearly defined archetype, and a clear reason for why they're there and why they need the guests' help. They understand the overall narrative arc of the show, roughly when we'll move into the next step of the narrative journey, and themes and notes to hit. But unlike many strictly choreographed immersive shows, they have no idea what direction their story will go at the start of the show; that depends on the audience.

We spend time in workshop sessions, to build relationships between the characters, the stories and their own expectations. There is no guarantee a character's goals will be achieved, thanks to the audience's agency to help or hinder them as they wish. This leads to gorgeous moments of triumph and betrayal, made real by the full range of the performers' talents. After the guests and characters spend the whole day together, eating, drinking, investigating, and scheming, real emotional connection in such moments is inevitable, in both the audience and the cast.

Despite the level of audience agency, the show is still carefully structured experience. Of course, the show can get very dramatic, and some likely moments and confrontations do get rehearsed around a loose structure. But even these are deeply affected by the audience's engagements with the show - which character's feeling confident? Who's had their dreams snatched away?

It takes a special kind of performer to understand the delicate balance between developing a character that responds in believable ways and helps the guests to navigate the complexities of the show, without feeling artificial. Audience members say that spending time with them felt just like talking to an ordinary person, which is high praise when the characters and the world they inhabit are both so very strange.

We ask a lot of our team, performing multiple 24-hour shows in a week, responding to whatever intense conflict and compromise the guests bring. How do we do it?

Ultimately, because we're not just an ensemble; we've become a family. We live together for weeks at a time, being kind, supportive, and helpful. We trust each other. That bond is, perhaps, the real secret of how you can create a 24-hour show without a script.

More information on The Key Of Dreams can be found here.

Photo credit: Lemon Difficult

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