Adventures at Lapworth Museum
Last week I was working on a new immersive theatre experience working with the University of Birmingham’s Lapworth Museum of Geology.
Lapworth Lates is an evening of creativity inspired by the collection at Lapworth, since the museum reopened, they’ve been happening every 6 months or so, they’re fun, free and accessible events. What I really enjoy is they blur the line between science and the creative arts which I always like because this mantra that creative subjects and STEM subjects don’t mix is a nonsense.
I was commissioned to produce a new piece of work that responded to the theme of adventure, I devised a performance that mixed up theatre, escape rooms and cosmic horror. The set up was a student has gone missing and rumours of a secret society haunt the campus. Strange things are happening at Lapworth can you help the new curator solve the mystery? The audience or players are guided by the museum curator (played wonderfully by Tom Crowhurst) and have to solve a number of puzzles which reveal another part of the story. As each task is completed the players/audience discover that the student has been kidnapped by a secret society known as The Royal Society of Necromancers. It’s a fun horror story influenced by H P Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and John Carpenter’s The Thing.
For a while I’ve wanted to experiment with mixing up escape room style games with a narrative and characters so this was an exciting opportunity to experiment with these things. Theatre is always in danger of taking it self to seriously, as makers we can forget that the purpose of theatre making is to have a good night out. Escape rooms are fun, well they’re fun if you enjoy being locked in a room with family or close friends and you enjoy solving puzzles whilst letting any tensions within the relationship slowly bubble to the surface as you quickly run out of time. I wanted to see how the energy of escape rooms blends with that of theatre.
I think audiences had fun and it was an interesting and enjoyable experiment, I owe a lot to Tom, who was open and willing to experiment and ultimately had to most of the heavy lifting on the night. The puzzles I think were right level of difficulty and the players were able to solve the mystery. The game only last about 30 minutes which isn’t really enough time, this didn’t hurt game playing aspect too much but it did mean the story ended rather underwhelming. We set up a lot of world building and characters, but the players never get to see this world not properly — I wonder what would happen if we had more actors. The final task brings the audience to the store room of the museum which is down a long corridor, watching players enter the room it was a real missed opportunity not to have another actor in that space, perhaps it could be the Royal Society, perhaps it could be the missing student.
If I have the opportunity again I’d like to make the game longer, myself and Tom had discussed the themes of the work we wanted to explore power structures within academia, who has power at a University? Why? Where did this power come from? Historically who had power? How has it changed? But ultimately these themes were totally under developed because there wasn’t the time. Just before I started writing this blog I saw that Marvel have ditched an introduction to the Golden Age of Marvel from Art Spiegelman for being too political…which is stupid comic books strength lies in that they fun and adventurous spaces that are allowed to explore big political ideas without lecturing, or becoming to self important — it would be a tragedy to the medium if they abandoned this. So yes theatre should be a good night out but there’s no reason that doesn’t mean it can’t ask big important questions. I guess it needs both, they need to be interlocking one feeds the other.
Hopefully I’ll get the opportunity to make something like this again, if I do I’ll try and document both the devising process as I go along. I’m trying to make this blog a weekly thing (I’ve said this before but now I’ve got it in writing), so I’ll be writing more about theatre making and playwriting in general. So subscribe or follow me on Twitter. Also if you took part in Lapworth Lates and you have feedback about the performance, please feel free to get in touch.
This was my second commission from the University of Birmingham, you can read about my project Myth Today here.
