steepholm

Some of you may not know that I’m in the U.S. at the moment - in theory I may write more about that here at some point, though time is likely to get away from me. (I have been to Scintillation! I have visited ambyr!)

This is me cheating by copying messages to immersive-theatre-enthusiast ambyr into a post, and it has not been checked for coherence. All spoilers but by the nature of immersive theatre I do not know what happened and so cannot spoil everything. The play takes place in an arts center on Governor’s Island and the ticket price includes ferry. (This ticket was a birthday gift from leaflemming, by the way.)

The Death of Rasputin: feels like an incomplete experience but I made it especially that way by following no single actor and staying in no single place.

It began in a bar with the audience - all dressed in black as instructed - buying drinks and mingling. I eyed people but none were secretly actors so far as I learned. (The format made me much more of an eavesdropper than usual, I wanted to hear if people were talking about the revolution!) Oh and I’d also thought that some people in the queue were talking in Russian because they were actors but I’m now pretty sure they just spoke Russian.

The play began with actors bursting into the bar from the rest of the set, declaring that the revolution would soon come and that til then we should hang out in their bar and stay away from those filthy royals up in the palace. I promptly went to the filthy royals’ palace.

I several times hung back when big groups were leaving the room, which let me see some interesting aftermaths. Three times, I was in small groups of people who’d stayed behind after a big scene. Once was a general plotting the downfall of Rasputin (very engagingly, and he had audience members read out bits of various incriminating documents - he handed me a book and had me open it to reveal a secret page. Generally the cast were great at interacting in-character when issuing instructions, telling you to speak up or clear a chair for them, etc. It was a lot of people in sometimes confined spaces but it all worked
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Another aftermath and one of my favourite single moments was having seen Rasputin and a character whose name I never knew - a witch - do a sex-magic dance in the downstairs cult forest (I barely saw what went on in the cult forest, there must have been so much else there!) and then seeing the priest making his way through the large departing audience crowd to look dumbfounded at the remnants, ‘sex magic’ being clearly not within his experience.

Then somehow I wound up upstairs following a maid into a revolutionary radio meeting, and then I followed the maid into someone’s private chamber where she poured out liquid into a small cup and I thought she was going to kill herself, but I never learned who drank from that cup because she moved into the next room and we helped her choose a dress for the big party which she had decided to attend despite the overtones of being a class traitor because she was going to finally kill the czar with a kitchen knife. She gave us scarves and bracelets to go over our black; me, she gave a small stone.

Then we whirled through to the ballroom where other revolutionaries one of whom she was in some kind of intense connection with were handing out dynamite, a plan that enraged her. And then everyone in the room was told to quickly start waltzing so I waltzed with a stranger and to audience members entering the room a moment later it must have looked like that had always been going on, with no trace of dynamite.

And then all the characters swept in and there was a grand final dance, and perhaps Rasputin died or perhaps the revolution began or both at once, and what I was mostly watching was the distress on the face of the maid who was standing there waiting for the palace to blow up and still not having the strength - would it have been strength? she’d asked us - to stab the czar.

This whole last passage was so, well, immersive - I loved being swept along in it. I could glimpse other things from context as I passed by - I know the czar was given a pig’s head in a macaron box. The czar gave a great speech at the end about there being no alternative to the pain spent building Russia, and Rasputin came sweeping in being a sort of counterstatement. Though at the same time he clearly had a thing for being debased by Mother Russia (who was usually the czarina but I think he seduced everyone possibly including the priest).

I have so many questions! What was the small white lounge? What could you have seen if you hid for long enough in the grandfather clock with a grille looking into the next room? Why did the general end up dancing with the witch at the end, and what became of his plan, and was she really a witch? What was the fully-furnished locked room connected to the bar? I think it would’ve been great to do with a group that could scatter across the experience and then debrief afterwards - as it was I did this just a little bit with some friendly strangers on the ferry back to the mainland.