Guest Blog: Owen Kingston Chats THE HOUSE OF CENCI Online

Parabolic Theatre has been a major presence within the world of interactive theatre-making since 2016, across a range of titles intended to shine a light on the various upheavals of our time. As the company prepares its latest offering, The House of Cenci, artistic director Owen Kingston tells us what to expect.

The Cenci has a huge theatrical legacy. The account of the Roman nobleman Francesco Cenci has twice been adapted for the stage - once by the great poet Percy Shelley, of Ozymandias fame, and then again by Antonin Artaud as a (rare) stage vehicle for his theories about the Theatre of Cruelty.

It is a story about a spoiled, enormously wealthy monster of a man who looks increasingly familiar in today's world of playboy billionaires used to doing whatever they want. Fashioning his actions into an immersive experience has long been an ambition for our company, although we never imagined doing so within a pandemic.

Parabolic Theatre has made a significant contribution to the immersive theatre scene with a variety of highly interactive shows that rely on the input of audiences to shape the specific tale being told. When lockdown threw a spanner into everyone's work, our continued survival both as a company and as individuals required us to move our activity online.

Over the last year we've experimented successfully with variations of Zoom-based interactive storytelling, finding that once the physical trappings of an immersive production are removed, it can actually be easier to transport audiences to locations that would prove very difficult in an in-person show - the deck of a Royal Navy battleship in England Expects, for example, or a fictional island in the Mediterranean in We Have A Situation. Once a narrative is unshackled from the physical constraints of what can be built inside an old warehouse, the minds of the audience can be transported anywhere, just as they can when reading a novel.

Nevertheless, one of the most difficult aspects to recreate online has been the feeling of exploration - something that immersive theatre fans have been acutely missing. Our answer to this has been to revive one of the oldest forms of computer-based gaming: the text adventure.

This medium has come a long way from its earliest examples, but the essential format of exploration and puzzle-based gameplay has a strong synergy with modern immersive productions. Shows such as Punchdrunk's Sleep No More could be described as such a game brought to life in the real world.

For us, the opportunity to create an immersive experience blending this gameplay with live interaction seemed the ideal solution. With the right story, we could mentally propel our audiences out of their homes and into another world.

Enter The Cenci. Little-known in this country but possessed of a much bigger legacy in Italy, the story is often referred to as "the Italian Hamlet" in its depiction of Beatrice Cenci's attempts to free herself from her monstrous father's incestuous affections: note the resonances with the #MeToo movement. We had long been planning an immersive retelling of this story, and it is something we one day hope to produce in-person, but its sprawling nature demands a detailed environment - something that would be enormously expensive physically but that could just as easily be built digitally within the text adventure format.

Later this month, audiences will be able to begin exploring the sprawling House of Cenci for free on our website, but in order to progress beyond a certain point they will need to buy a ticket for one of our Zoom evenings where, for an hour at a time, live actors will populate the house via links embedded in the game. Interacting with these players will unlock ever more aspects to explore, allowing participants to delve further into the mysteries of the Cenci family. We fervently hope that this combination of online game and live performance will transport audiences to a world in which they can get lost, just as they might had this been built in the real world.

The House of Cenci is available from 15 February

Image credits: Dan O'Connell and Owen Kingston (main image), Zoe Bartlett (image of Owen Kingston)