It’s all going on off-stage

10 April 2012

We are in the midst of a mini theatrical boom. London audiences are spoiled for choice between Jude Law's Hamlet, Sam Mendes's Bridge project at the Old Vic, Helen Mirren's Phèdre and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. British shows, from Billy Elliot to The Norman Conquests, rule Broadway and the Tonys. Alongside the burgeoning of conventional theatre there's a flourishing of alternative methods of staging. You could call them site-specific or promenade performances, but a better term might be immersive theatre.

The most prominent of the current crop of such shows is Kursk. The experimental troupe Sound and Fury have transformed the Young Vic's Maria studio into the interior of a British nuclear submarine, the audience milling cheek-by- jowl with the crew as all witness the sinking of the titular Russian vessel. It is a heady, potently atmospheric work, where sound and lighting design are as important as script and performance, born out of the company's experiments with creating theatre in total darkness.

Over the river, Vagabonds' Voyage by Little Wonder takes as its setting a stretch of the Regent's Canal between St Pancras and Islington. This community-minded devised show (staged as part of Camden People's Theatre's Sprint festival) explores the forgotten people from different generations and social castes who have used the canal for work or recreation. A Victorian lock-keeper's mistress mourns her drowned illegitimate daughter. A sharp-eyed present-day saleswoman offers strawberries and scones as she flogs luxury apartments in the regenerated area. Our guide is a homeless alcoholic.

The walk along the towpath includes recorded testimony from local residents and a sketchy history lesson about the waterside buildings, from Thorley's cattle cake factory to Gatti's ice wells (now the Canal Museum) at Battlebridge Basin, where London's first ice-creams were created. But the most striking moment is the finale, a narrowboat trip through the half-mile long, footpath-less tunnel between King's Cross and Islington. Here, the water is so still and reflective, the boat feels as if it's floating gently back in time along a tube of ragged, ancient brick, like a bubble in a spirit level.

This week, too, sees the revival of Mincemeat by Cardboard Citizens in the semi-derelict Cordy House in Shoreditch. The show takes its name from the wartime counter-espionage operation in which a corpse dressed as an officer, with bogus invasion plans in its clothing, was cast ashore on a Spanish beach for the Axis powers to discover. Cardboard Citizens, which employs formerly homeless actors, learned that the corpse used was that of a homeless man. The journey through the building unravels his identity through documentation and a fantastical narrative inspired by this bizarre plot.

These three shows are radically different from each other. Vagabonds' Voyage takes its inspiration directly from its setting. Mark Espiner of Sound and Fury says he "toyed with the idea" of staging Kursk in a real submarine, but chose instead to recreate the interior at a theatre "because we needed a space we could completely control". Adrian Jackson of Cardboard Citizens chose Cordy House simply "because it had street access, and we bring in a vehicle early on: it's also in just the right state of semi-dereliction, with pretty good acoustics, for our ­purposes. I think in promenade or site-specific theatre that a building should be enhanced rather than transformed, and that the audience should be led through the space by a narrative, rather than herded about."

What unites the three productions is an ambition to get away from the traditional, passive process of experiencing theatre. "It's about generating an excitement through proximity to the performers, and a sense of inclusivity," says Adrian Jackson. Katherine Maxwell-Cook, co-founder of Little Wonder and co-creator of Vagabonds' Voyage, also talks about the excitement generated by placing a fictional story in a real setting, and of preserving a moment in time in London's ever-changing history: "You break down barriers of how people behave at an ordinary show. You give the audience more freedom and you can work in a more filmic way." For Espiner and his co-creators, Kursk was about a total sensory experience. "We're ­competing these days with TV and film," he says, "so we wanted to play to ­theatre's unique strength, which is that we're all in the same place together, to create the most exciting, moving and potent experience we could."

Of course, promenade theatre is nothing new: it dates back at least to medieval Mystery Plays. And the current crop of innovative shows are built on earlier successes. Cardboard Citizens has ­created peripatetic, site-specific work almost since its formation in 1991. Recent extraordinary installations and productions have been created by the innovative companies Shunt and Punchdrunk (whose next project will be unveiled this summer as part of the Manchester Festival). Earlier explorations of the form were pioneered by Théâtre de Complicité. Katherine Maxwell-Cook and her co-director Sara Kewly have between them staged plays in libraries, hotels and in Tate Britain. Indeed, watching Kursk and Vagabonds' Voyage I am reminded of past, unique experiences: a restaging of the battle of Gododdin in a disused Cardiff car factory by Brith Goff 20 years ago; glimpsing winged figures at the windows of the Euston Tower in Deborah Warner's Angels Project in 1999.

So the way of mounting this kind of theatre may not signal a departure, but many of the ideas, by definition, are original and exciting and, undeniably, we're currently experiencing a high-water mark of immersive theatre. Dive in.

Kursk is at the Young Vic (020 7922 2922) until 27 June; Vagabonds' Voyage (08700 600 100, booking essential) takes place on the Regent's Canal until 20 June; Mincemeat is at Cordy House, 87-95 Curtain Road, EC2 until 12 July —bookings via Soho Theatre on 020 7478 0100 or www.sohotheatre.com

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