Blackout theatre specials Darkfield – aka Glen Neath and David Rosenberg – have spent years crafting meticulously disorientating immersive words that audience members experience via sophisticated headphones-based binaural sound design, performed in entirely lightless shipping containers.
On the whole, they feel like surreal, sinister dreams: evocative but you’re effectively a passenger – just along for the ride, with no real agency of your own, and as the (very short) shows wear on and you get acclimatised to the darkness I’ve generally found the whole thing starts to feel a bit sillier.
Arcade is a clever and unsettling leap forwards, giving you a degree of agency as you’re stood at an old school arcade machine with a big button on it that you press to indicate ‘yes’ in the choose-your-own-adventure style story. You do not in fact play an arcade game, but the general understanding in the interactive story relayed through your headphones is that you’re an avatar named Milk in a game that you could either interpret as intended to be imagined as sophisticated VR or taken literally as a headphones game from Darkfield. Whatever the case, you’re thrust into a violent, absurdist dystopia and while one button might not sound like a lot of agency, when I got shot point blank in the head within about 30 seconds of starting after making an innocuous decision, the button did start to feel like quite a lot of responsibility.
Quite how much agency we really have in Arcade is hard to know: despite the sense of choice, it’s notable that the lights in the shipping container all come up all at once at the end, suggesting that every participant’s story must have reached broadly the same conclusion at the same time. But the business with the button and some further fiddling about with a token slot made me feel I had purchase in this world and while the arcade machines are clearly a mental nudge towards the idea of video gaming rather than in any way being video gaming, I found the nudge effective. A further nudge is given by some special effects that made the scenes of violence feel particularly alarming and made me anxious to avoid further choices that would get me killed.
It made for 25 somewhat absurd but certainly very intense minutes – and unusually for a Darkfield show, I could have handled another 25 minutes more in Arcade’s cracked, dangerous world.
