Somnai review – ambitious VR show that needs to get real
I’m at the edge of a rocky canyon, about to jump. Looking down at my arms, it seems my body has become a network of tiny blue stars. I wiggle a translucent arm. Swallowing my fear of heights, I step forward – and am teleported into a forest filled with Alice-in-Wonderland mushrooms and scuttling alien critters. Not bad, for a Monday.
Ellipsis Entertainment certainly know how to dream big. The London theatre company have raised more than ￡3 million from wide-eyed investors for Somnai, their very first production. They plan to roll it out as a worldwide franchise. Before they do, it needs some serious work.
Performed across two floors of a warehouse a short walk from Old Street's Silicon Roundabout, Somnai is being promoted as a groundbreaking blend of immersive theatre and Virtual Reality technology. A novel idea, but the show feels more like a half-baked pastiche of both than a successful example of either.
Where it falls down is the narrative. The audience arrive as “patients” at Somnai, the titular cult-cum-clinic where (we are told) one can master the art of lucid dreaming, in order to obtain happiness, professional fulfilment and great big piles of dosh – with possible side effects ("May cause acute death”). After necking a non-alcoholic cocktail from a test tube, visitors are processed in batches of six through a series of waiting rooms, before entering a “lucid dream state” by donning a VR headset.
But those rooms – elegantly decorated by set designers Alice Helps and Julie Belinda Landau – connect in no meaningful way, evoking nothing beyond a fleeting sense of unease. There’s a futuristic aesthetic in one room, then a pre-historic occult temple vibe in the next; it's hard to see how they gel together.
As we’re shuttled from one to another, our nameless guide makes philosophical chitchat (“Where would you fly to?”), reads us half a macabre fairytale, and gives us a motivational peptalk (“You can be the boss!”). We have no real sense of what Somnai is meant to be, and there's little to suggest the team behind it do does either. There’s nothing wrong with plotless, ambient theatre; it’s something that immersive pioneers Shunt have made their specialty, though Somnai lacks Shunt’s dadaist chutzpah, hedging its bets with an ill-thought-out framing device.
When the first VR section arrives – a generic-feeling flight simulation – the graphics are a disappointment, roughly on a par with the 1993 video-game Myst. The disjointed, surreal introduction leads into an eerily flat and soulless dream; that should be the other way around, surely?
A second VR scene – there are three, amounting to 10-15 minutes of the hour-long show – is far more impressive, allowing the visitor to walk freely through landscapes (including that dizzying canyon and forest). But only the final VR segment chimes with the themes of the surrounding drama. With the rest, there’s the sense that the videos were commissioned first, and a live performance loosely cobbled together around them, drawing on all of immersive theatre's usual tics and tropes. A chase through a haunted house was genuinely heart-pounding, but could have been borrowed from any number of earlier, more cohesive shows.
London theatre: the best plays and shows on now
According to Jason Lanier, the tech pioneer who started the very first VR company back in the Eighties, the real magic of the medium is what happens when the goggles come off. “The most ordinary surface, cheap wood or plain dirt, is bejewelled in infinite detail for a short while,” he has said. “To look into another’s eyes is almost too intense.”
It’s a feeling created by young actress Polly Waldron, who carried the show almost single-handedly as our nameless guide. Grappling with unpromising material, Waldron was a magnetic, intense presence. It’s a part that requires the performer to be spiritual, corporate, childish, otherworldly, creepy and reassuring, often all at once. Waldron pulled it off with aplomb, never allowing the tension to drop for a moment (even when half the scenes take place in glorified waiting rooms). It's a pity that the mechanics of the show – a cast of 30 working in shifts – mean you're very unlikely to see her in the role.
There is a reason events like Somnai exist, and it’s not storytelling. In the last decade, immersive theatre has gone from a quirky fringe phenomenon to big business, thanks to blockbuster events such as Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man (2013), or Secret Cinema’s multimedia promenade shows. "It’s already over a $1 trillion market in the US,” Ellipsis’s CEO Andrew McGuinness said in a recent interview. "It’s largely driven by millennials on social media.”
Somnai has succeeded in reaching that demographic; on press night, a brace of young Netflix fans were heard debating whether it was more like Black Mirror or Stranger Things. In a few years, there may be a show that seamlessly blends interactive video technology with live theatre – five-dimensional Netflix, if you will – but this is not that show.
Still, it would be wrong to dismiss Somnai as money-grubbing McTheatre; the technical ambition is admirable, and the set design (complete with piped-in smells) very impressive indeed. But it’s that intense look in the eyes of the living, human performer that will linger with you.
Somnai is at 2 Pear Tree St, London EC1, until May 6. Tickets cost ￡50; dotdot.london