Lora Krasteva’s Descension kicks off a series of works on the new interactive digital theatre platform FableMosh, developed by Nottingham-based theatre company Chronic Insanity. Taking last year’s UK far-right, anti-immigration protests and riots as inspiration, Krasteva’s mini spoken word play imagines a world where migrants in the UK begin to disappear. The ‘pandemic’ recalls the early days of Covid with “daily updates and numbers” on the spread.
You have the option to choose your own cast on the interactive platform, add an ambient soundscape and adjust its volume to your preference – a feature that many television viewers might welcome. With zero variation in the soundscape, the latter becomes a distraction that I turn down and eventually turn off. That is as far as the interactive elements go – at least on this production (five more are set to follow, coming monthly between now and August).
There is only one character in Descension who recounts events in general terms so the casting potential is limited, restricting the interactive element further. There is the opportunity to switch the performer you are watching at any point – something that isn’t seamlessly matched (switch and you’ll likely hear one or two sentences you’ve already heard) but which is fine, provided you don’t change too often.
The real issue is not technical, it’s that there is little benefit to changing. To fully inform this review, I cycle through the eight performers who sit in front of the same (unused) green screen, script-in-hand. Each has their own take on the character. I move from Jamie Stewart, formal and quietly indignant, to the casual and confounded Emily Webster – two strikingly different takes, and yet nothing really changes. A move from Peyvand Sadeghian’s breathless telling of events to Jordan Laidley’s meandering take provides similar results.
There is little opportunity for the performers to add their unique stamp to the role, particularly when the character they’re playing is barely a character at all. At its best it recalls Simon Stephens’ adaptation of José Saramago’s novel Blindness, which played at the Donmar Warehouse in August 2020 as lockdown restrictions first began to lift, but, for the most part, the story is too high-level, the examination of its themes too thin and the images too obvious to create a similarly striking immersive experience.
For example, to begin, our narrator lists all the things that happened when the immigrants first disappeared: the NHS collapsing, people dying, fewer doctors, longer queues, no blood samples, machines beeping, phones ringing unanswered, the post office stopped delivering letters, no one played football, no one was at the gym, no baristas, no litter-pickers, chaos, mayhem, and so on and so on. Krasteva labours the point.
The format doesn’t help matters. As a viewer, it mostly feels exactly how it looks: someone sitting on a chair reading from a page. You can see the potential in what Chronic Insanity is trying to do here – the prospect of a play’s meaning subtly shifting depending on how a cast selected by the viewer interprets their characters – but, in a one-person show with little drama and actors reading from scripts as if at an early table read, it falls entirely flat.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
