A Midnight Visit

Broad Encounters’ A Midnight Visit – a touring multi-room immersive production – takes the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe as its inspiration. For Brisbane’s iteration, it transforms a soon-to-be-demolished building in Fortitude Valley into a funeral parlour and, beyond it, an uncanny, gothic dreamscape you explore at your own pace. A production like this – or Malthouse’s concurrent Because the Night – is compelling in its rejection of theatre’s pivotal boundary; the fourth wall isn’t so much broken as it is never built. An audience member is, inherently, part of the show. A Midnight Visit’s two-storey labyrinth is described as ‘a playground for adults’. Given that we grownups are afforded few opportunities for genuine play, a visit to Poe’s mind palace lends a funhouse buzz to the car park we gather in. In timed batches, we file into a funeral parlour complete with coffins at bargain prices and an old television looping warped 1990s funeral commercials promising ‘exquisite taste’ and ‘dignity’. Then we’re given our instructions (don’t cross any threshold labelled ‘nevermore’), separated from our loved ones, and ferried through one of three doors into the beyond. I’m sent into a dining room in which a woman (Meg Hickey) in an Elizabethan frock mimes eating her dinner, which is a plate of sparkling black sand. My partner is next door, in a living room, where a mercurial king (Lucinda Shaw) has taken to the piano. The division is clearly to help disperse the crowd. But when we move on from our respective rooms, my partner and I only find each other thanks to the audience traffic jam in the AstroTurf cemetery. It’s not clear whether we’re allowed to roam free yet, so the audience waits politely, blockading the central hallways. Shouldering past (that’s a no on social distancing – though even before the pandemic this production mandated black masks, due to a prescient ‘tuberculosis outbreak’), we meander through a series of tableaux inhabited by wandering players. They are no more bound to one room than we are, so you have the option to follow or make your own path. You’ve got to hand it to the actors, whose nightly four- to five-hour endurance performances, looping energetically through hours of devised script, ensure that no two visitors see the same show. They play archetypes: a king (Shaw) and his jester (Kristian Santic); a ghostly asylum nurse (Hannah Raven); an actress desperate for your approval (Hickey); and the Raven (Gina Tay Limpus), whose chamber door you were just ushered through. Shaw’s Zen Zen Zo credentials are evident as the cast member most at ease with A Midnight Visit’s campy commitment to Poe’s dark romanticism. Perhaps I took a wrong turn, but – going from room to room – I felt I was perpetually catching the end of a monologue or interaction. If I followed the performer to their next destination, it was often too crowded to enter. The more fragments I caught, the more I felt there was no thread to follow. Downstairs, the rooms lean Victorian: a parlour, an opium den, a decrepit hospital wing, and – just to keep you guessing – a ball pit. Upstairs, things turn more surreal: neon streamers obscure our way into a grotto in which we hotbox dry ice and watch the Raven (Limpus, compelling in drag-king mode) introduce the Actress, who performs Ophelia’s famous ramblings before drowning in a UV-lit pond. It’s well acted but lacks context, relying on self-referentiality. You get the feeling that you should have crammed all of Poe and, for some reason, Hamlet and King Lear. The Poe references are plentiful but tremendously literal – nothing feels like more than the sum of its parts. The set is atmospheric, but many of these three dozen rooms don’t do anything. Without a story to piece together or a quest to complete, the rooms can’t invite you to stay. Even if you wanted to look more closely – some, I understand, contained puzzles – there is generally a queue. You peer into a priest-less confessional booth or a room wallpapered with bedraggled toys, and then shuffle back out to let someone else have a go. At one stage, I am gridlocked in a crawlspace tunnel between two confused fellow visitors; it’s one of few moments during A Midnight Visit when I felt fear or, to be honest, much of anything. And there’s the rub: with all the focus on bells and whistles, what A Midnight Visit lacks is emotional effect. Even the unnerving sound design (Michael Theiler and Peret von Sturmer) leaks, blurs, and trails off through velvet curtains serving as walls. A Midnight Visit’s website bills the show as ‘the first of its kind in Australia’ – and I imagine here the copy refers to large-scale immersive productions of the likes of New York’s long-running Sleep No More and Banksy’s Dismaland. But smaller-scale theatre of this kind has been thriving – in Brisbane at least – for more than a decade. To name just a few: Room 328 (2010), 지하 Underground (2011), Sons of Sin (2013), Dream a House (2017), and La Silhouette (2019). I can’t help but compare A Midnight Visit to the enduring emotional effect of Thomas Quirk’s 2012 production of The Raven, which saw Metro Arts’ tiny Sue Benner Theatre filled with three tonnes of dirt. In that show, a dozen or so guests entered barefoot into the damp darkness to sit at Poe’s dining table and enter his troubled, lonely dreams. Those shows, at their most successful, were immersive not because their sets were elaborate but because their scripts, direction, and performance came together to immerse the audience in a feeling. What A Midnight Visit gains in freedom for its performers and audience members, it loses in cohesion and impact. A Midnight Visit deserves kudos for its risk-taking, its scale, and its theatre-as-theme-park approach – even if I never felt in danger of falling into a dream within a dream. A Midnight Visit is being performed at the House of Usher (95 Robertson Street, Fortitude Valley) from 27 July to 12 September. This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

A Midnight Visit

A Midnight Visit

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Zenobia Frost

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