‘Jury Duty’ Is An Experience You Won’t Want to Avoid (Review)

In a time of self-isolation, the wheels of justice must continue to spin: in-person trials have been suspended but the courts are still in operation. Logging on at a designated time to join a remote jury of my peers, I watch as up to eleven other faces appear on my screen, all of our eyes flickering from feed to feed as we take stock of strangers’ living arrangements and prepare to pass judgment on another person’s crimes from the comfort of our homes.

Jury Duty has commenced.

Exit Productions has a history of bringing tabletop games into the theatre. Having previously experienced their productions Revolution and Fight Night wherein they incorporated game piece/token-based interactions in order to more deeply immerse audiences in the narratives, I’m skeptical as to how they might incorporate their signature tactic without having mailed anything out to their patrons. I also haven’t yet had a good experience with immersive theatre via remote video, the bane of corporate meetings. I fail to engage meaningfully with a performance format that only allows one person to speak at a time, doesn’t provide personal interactions nor drives group engagement, and continues to be plagued with environmental sound interruptions and connectivity issues. The fact that the show’s runtime is nearly two hours long further concerns me — how much genuinely valuable performance content can they viably deliver remotely for that period of time?

My worries ultimately prove unfounded: little do I know that Exit Productions had previously undertaken a weeklong R&D project titled Cabin Fever, the sole aim of which was to create playable experiences which connect through isolation. The resulting collated report is, in a word, extensive. Over three dozen pages of it. They’ve done their homework, and it’s about to show.

Once we have all gathered (there is meant to be twelve of us but tonight only nine have managed to log on), our Ministry of Justice Coordinator screen-shares a very slickly designed preparatory film and explains that the defendant has waived his right to an attorney and so there will be no one leading the examinations but us. There is extensive evidence that we would do well to divide and conquer to examine, and we will have the opportunity to question the defendant directly. The coordinator then moves us into two roughly-equally divided “break out” spaces, and then grants us access to the evidence.

It. Is. Extensive.

(The following contains minor spoilers).

It is an avalanche of material, all professionally designed and all relevant to the case. Not only are there ZIP files upon ZIP files full of testimony, documents, maps, drawings, and recordings, but there’s an interactive searchable database as well. Suddenly the two hours’ run time seems pitifully short if we are to have any hope of getting an accurate understanding of the case. Divide-and-conquer is the only tactic — we speedily assign responsibilities and commence reading, running commentary all the while.

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I leave my camera on while I read and explore in other tabs. From time to time someone will chime in from their own station with a concerning piece of evidence. We add our questions to a running shared document that we reference while questioning the defendant. We begin to see not just the facts of the case as they’re presented, but an insidious pattern underneath, which suggests a deeper conspiracy. Someone notices a code in a confiscated document which leads to an outside website with hidden material. Along the way, we’re making attempts to remote-access the defendant’s locked iPhone and witness an ongoing conversation between his outside contacts. As we’re exploring that, someone else chimes in that they’ve received an email to their personal inbox, outside of the meeting and database: jury tampering has begun.

Once we’re permitted to begin directly questioning the defendant in yet another breakout room — either alone or in groups of two to three, should we choose to engage — it’s clear he’s part of something much bigger than just himself. Actor Tom Black (previously appearing in For King and Country: 1944) is alone in a white room with just a phone handset to communicate with his trial proceedings. Black’s wide, earnest eyes and staccato vocal timbre belie his character’s desperation, but he’s unwilling to cooperate until we gain his trust. It isn’t until we decide to pass along messages from the tampering emails that he begins to open up and direct us toward more information. Even then his word cannot be fully trusted as the evidence continues to refute some of his testimony.

The experience is wall-to-wall bananas. In the end, after the full jury reconvenes and passes judgment on his three charges, we watch as denouement credits roll and learn that we still missed a track of evidence and there was a plot point we didn’t manage to uncover.

Afterwards, I stay online with a few others and we meet with Black and coordinator Joe Ball from Exit Productions to discuss the creative and performance process. I am stunned to learn that the entire performance is run by just those two people; that there isn’t a team of handlers sending the outside emails as well as herding us jury members around the breakout spaces and troubleshooting any connection issues. It seems like a gargantuan task, especially when one of the two live operators is also busy, you know, acting. But Ball assures me that the experience is designed for up to twelve people and could reasonably take more with a little scaling.

Ball and Black also explain that the key players in the investigation were originally based on real people, the clues being fully searchable on the world wide web. But due to the internet rabbit holes their R&D players ended up falling down, the production company opted instead to build an in-house repository of information so as to keep their players more tightly corralled. I ask if they’re at all concerned that their extremely well-crafted “Ministry of Justice” films and documents — which are based off the gov.uk website designs and cite a fictional Justice Act (2020) and its revolution of the trial process — might leak out and be taken seriously by an incensed real-world populace which is currently demonstrating and protesting around the globe against police brutality. They reply that every document has a fictional disclaimer included on it and includes inactive and inaccurate website domains; so as long as nothing is cropped out or cited out of context they have already planned for that possibility.

While Jury Duty doesn’t lend itself well to repeat experiences (unless you’re willing to watch and not take part), it’s overwhelmingly worth the price of admission. Boasting fully engaging gaming-style entertainment without being forced to interact beyond one’s comfort level, the two solid hours of the experience could have easily stretched into three. The brilliance of the production design is such that even once in-person performances begin again, Exit Productions could feasibly continue to run this show, given its fully digital and grossly engaging nature: it works both for groups of strangers as well as friends, so long as each participant has access to a webcam and a web browser (though a laptop or desktop computer is preferable for best engagement).

The final verdict is this: Jury Duty is an experience you don’t want to be excused or excluded from.

Jury Duty continues through June 26. Tickets are £16.76.

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