Let the Right Ones In with Darkfield Radio’s ‘VISITORS’ (Review)

VISITORS is an audio experience designed for two — only two — living, breathing humans. This is something you might want to remember when you tune in because its characters are going to take up residence in your living room whether you like it or not.

Glen Neath and David Rosenberg, artistic directors of Darkfield in London, have a reputation for messing with peoples’ heads. Before 2020, the two collaborated on live touring productions — SÉANCE (2016), FLIGHT (2018), and COMA (2020) — which took place in shipping containers, relied heavily on binaural surround-sound and leaned into sensory deprivation to alter the audience’s sense of reality. It’s a formula that works really, really well. Imagine walking into a shipping container with 19 strangers. The walls are lined with rich fabric; you remove the headphones from their tether on the wall behind you and settle in to one of 20 identical red velvet chairs. Low lights flicker as ambient noise is replaced with a soundscape so convincing you’re not sure whether it’s your eyes or your ears that aren’t syncing up with reality. This is the signature Darkfield moment. And it’s what Darkfield’s creative team serves up with Darkfield Radio, a new project set to “deliver immersive audio experiences to audiences at home.”

Darkfield Radio boils Darkfield down to its essence: stripping away the physical and putting you at the center of an intimate, immersive, acoustic performance. Since Neath and Rosenberg know what they’re doing when it comes to playing with sound, and since intimate theatre is my jam, I was pleased to find myself at the center of VISITORS for a private performance in my own living room.

VISITORS is an audio drama for two, played over the Darkfield Radio app, using smartphones and headphones. One ticket gets you two codes so that you and your partner can log in separately to enjoy the show. That last part is important as each participant’s audio track is different, so you’ll both need to have downloaded the app and entered your codes ahead of time. Unlike podcasts, Darkfield Radio broadcasts take place at specific times. Booking a ticket mimics the experience of live theatre, which means choosing your time and date in advance. (Sidebar: I find this style of digital performance a little stressful. Inevitable tech difficulties, as well as tech being run by the audience, can easily lead to a botched experience; I’ve had minor problems in the past, but Darkfield has an incredibly responsive team who handles issues like these quickly.) Finally, the show has specific location and preparation requirements. You’ll need a “living room with a door that can be closed” in which you can “clear space so you can sit with 3m of space between you” and your partner.

Get Leah Davis’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

SubscribeSubscribe

Setting up for a show is part of my ritual; it’s the thing that invites me into its universe. That used to mean dressing the part and getting there early for cocktails. Lately, it’s meant exploring in-universe emails and social media accounts. Darkfield eschews this style of world-building in favor of clear instructions and links to their web site; the Darkfield Radio universe exists entirely within its app. Or maybe it exists in the real world, but only when you open that portal on your phone, and only for 20 minutes at a time.

Having time to set up gives me room to (over)think about what I want out of an immersive show: I want to be invited into a new world. I want all of my senses to be engaged. I want to see and be seen. And, when the time comes, I want to be shepherded back to my normal life — preferably with a new perspective and some way to feel connected to the world I just left. My wants are simple, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to achieve.

VISITORS hits most of these notes admirably, which is impressive considering how little control they have over their audience’s physical space. The only time I felt let down was during the show’s sendoff. It’s a minor issue, though, so we’ll get to it in a minute. What really sticks out is VISITORS’ transporting, all-encompassing audio, made possible by Darkfield’s recording setup: a mannequin bust with imitation ear canals that captures details like buzzing flies, scraping chairs, and rattling door handles. Binaural sound is built for intimate audio for headphones the same way surround-sound is built for large spaces. It’s uncanny.

The audio for VISITORS will swallow you whole if you let it. It’s got a solid, physical quality that pulled me from my living room into a parallel universe that looked like home but felt like a mystery. I put on my headphones and space shifted slightly, giving me the sense that my entire house had been plucked up off of its street and plopped next in line — for what? I wasn’t sure, but I wanted to find out. This was the moment I fully arrived. My tech was working, my partner was seated across from me, and I could smell the dusty books on my side table, with only the cold air between us. I knew I was going to have all of my senses engaged, despite this being an audio-only performance.

I won’t share details about the show that aren’t already on Darkfield’s web site, but I will say that I had come to VISITORS wanting to feel afraid. Instead, the show made me feel strangely swaddled. The narrative is suggestive instead of plot-driven, exploring touch, hunger, and identity — if the thought of being inspected makes you uncomfortable, this might not be the show for you. But if you enjoy seeing and being seen, you’ll find space outside of the audio for moments of connection with your fellow audience member. I loved watching mine lose a little bit of their self-consciousness as they accepted the story and turned inwards. This is clearly a show built for two people in one room. It’s intimate and physical, even though the audience never touches.

Overall, I found that my 20 minutes with Darkfield went by too quickly. VISITORS is a sharp little show whose end arrived before I knew it, with an admonition to remove my headphones that felt borderline unceremonious. I would have loved 15 minutes of post-show music: something to leave on while my partner and I talked about our experience and readjusted to real life. This is where VISITORS stumbles; they don’t leave enough space to transition, and they don’t leave a path for me to connect back to my experience. It’s an issue that almost all remote shows deal with: how do you send a remote audience home with a token or a playbill? Perhaps some special words meant to be remembered, or a promise of something in the future. Any of that could have been enough.

Regardless, just like the visitors I had invited into my house, I’m hungry — so hungry — for ways to reconnect to my VISITORS experience. And I’ve been wandering forlornly back to the app checking for evidence of my own visit all week. So maybe Darkfield got everything right after all.

VISITORS is currently scheduled to continue through December 5. Tickets are $15 for two participants.

NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today!

In addition to the No Proscenium web site, our podcast, and our newsletters, you can find NoPro on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, in the Facebook community Everything Immersive, and on our Slack forum.

Office facilities provided by Thymele Arts, in Los Angeles, CA.