Blog 4 – Day 3

Mylo McDonald in our 2023 production of The Changeling taken by Charlie Flint

Following on from our discussions yesterday about using AR not as non-diegetic scenery but as a tool within the world of the play, we jumped ahead in the text a couple pages to a moment of military planning between Brutus and Cassius. Brutus favours one tactic, Cassius another, and both attempt to illustrate their points by bringing up immersive battlefield maps.

This integrated well. After only a quick practice, it ceased to feel fiddly and became just another prop we could play with. It was powerful in how it illuminated details of the outside world – the battlefield, locations referenced but never seen – allowing us to visualise the topography and place ourselves there. Without the AR, this information of ancient cities might wash over an audience as archaic detail. Fair enough to be honest.

The tech also suggested immediacy and expediency, injecting pace into the scene while giving the characters’ planning a sense of urgency. After all, in the middle of a war you might not want to be fussing with maps and compasses if you could simply plug into an environment and draw lines directly onto a GPS map from a god’s-eye view.

This felt like our strongest use case so far for how the current state of the tech could be used in-show. It was dramatically clear, not clunky to act with, and didn’t rely on the audience suspending their disbelief.

The last configuration we tested was strapping phones to our chests, each equipped with an AR map that scanned the room and cast it onto screens, showing the actors appearing in a different world. The arrangement of screens meant I could see Brutus in the AR world on the display directly behind the real Brutus I was speaking to. Far from distracting, it worked on my imagination in a strange way, like a mental image of the person made manifest behind them. It subtly informed my physicality. Not simply because I was conscious of the technical need to avoid glitches, but also because my imagination began to buy into the suggestion of this parallel world that lay hovering in my peripheral vision.

I feel this approach could serve as a potential rehearsal tool to help actors work with imaginative environments, images, abstract ideas. On a practical level, it also suggests potential benefits for touring companies — mapping a venue ahead of time so actors can begin making the space their own before arriving, reducing acclimatisation time and allowing performances to lock in more quickly.

Anyway, what a great week with plenty of discoveries and lots of stuff to chew on moving forward…