Review: PLAYTHROUGH, Oran Mor, Glasgow
Part of the A Play, A Pie and A Pint series.
The beauty of the A Play, A Pie and A Pint programming is that they're not afraid to shake things up a bit. That's exactly what they're doing this week with Kenny Boyle's Playthrough, a new interactive horror piece. It's not the sort of show that you'd expect for the usual lunchtime crowd.
Friends Biggs (Kenny Boyle) and Wedge (Karen Bartke) have managed to get their hands on a copy of the video game Killswitch. According to legend, only 5,000 copies of this game were made and if you played it on easy mode, the game would self-destruct on completion. Copies are extremely hard to find but one man who did track it down on eBay with a view to playing the harder mode was never heard from again... Biggs and Wedge have secured a copy of the game and they plan to complete it on difficult mode. But will they?
A slight knowledge of gaming or early internet usage will definitely benefit you for a couple of gems in this script but most things are really well explained. The Killswitch gaming footage isn't seen but while one player is immersed in the game, the other tells us old gaming urban legends. The format of the show has been well-designed to create tension and there are a few jump scares throughout.
At one point there is a request for audience members under the age of fourteen to be led out of the audience by a member of staff, as the next part wasn't suitable for them. Full disclosure, I was weighing up whether it would be weird if I tried to follow them out to safety.
What makes Playthrough a little bit different is that the audience are presented with options for how the show progresses. This is particularly great for fans of Choose Your Own Adventure books. Each question means the characters take a different path, meaning the show could change for every day of its run.
While both performers are great on their own and handle the storytelling well, their interactions with each other are a little clunky and the dialogue feels forced. Playthrough is an interesting concept for a show that has so much potential and just needs a little bit of fine-tuning.
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