Les Enfants Terribles: Systems for Immersive Storytelling

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling, and it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the FoST Podcast. While in London recently I had the opportunity to meet with James Seager and Oliver Lansley, the creative and artistic directors of UK based theater company La James and Oliver. Founded the company in 2002 and have since created numerous critically acclaimed, traditional and immersive theater productions. Their best known immersive project. Alice’s Adventures Underground was nominated for an Olivier Award during its initial run in 2015, revived in 2017 in London again, and then traveled to Shanghai, China for an additional two years. The show is now returning to London to an all new space that will finally be its permanent home set to open in 2024. What separates LA from other immersive theater makers is that they’ve not only created engaging story experiences, but also devised complex systems and strategies to run them efficiently. Alice’s Adventures Underground is a well-oiled machine that operates with incredible precision and economy while maintaining the high touch that makes immersive theaters so special. With this show, James and Oliver have found a model that allows an experience to be both emotionally powerful and economically successful, something that immersive theater really needs to be able to grow. Please join me in welcoming James Seager and Oliver Lansley to the FoST podcast.

 

James, Ollie, welcome to the Future of Storytelling podcast. Such a delight to have you here.

James Seager:

It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for having us.

Charlie Melcher:

So I think we should just start this officially with me raising a pint for both of you. Cheers here.

James Seager:

Cheers. Cheers.

Charlie Melcher:

So we’re here in London and you’ve just given me this extraordinary behind the scenes tour of your new immersive venue, and I’m just blown away, even though it’s still mostly under construction. You can just see the level of detail and thought and planning and so much work that’s gone into this even to get to where we are. Let me ask you to tell us about the show that you’re building and how this space came about.

James Seager:

Sure. So this show is Alice’s Adventures Underground. It first premiered in 2015 in London, and it came from the back of Ollie and I wanting to get into immersive theater, but no one was reusing that word back then in 2013 and 2014. But essentially we were seeing immersive shows and for us we were getting it a bit frustrated with shows that we were seeing because for us it was missing kind of narrative and there were too many people, you were missing things and there were some amazing experiences out there. But for us, we felt we wanted to add something. We wanted to have story at the forefront of immersive theater. So we started to think about what would make a good immersive show. And I think that’s a crucial thing to think about because nowadays there’s a lot of immersive shows out there, but sometimes I think that is a question that you do have to ask, why should it be immersive? Well,

Oliver Lansley:

What world would you like to go to and disappear into?

James Seager:

Absolutely. And we looked at one property and we couldn’t really get the rights to it, and we were a little bit gutted with that one property that’s very well known. But then we thought, well, what else is out there? And I think it was Anthony actually who’s a co-writer with Ollie. He said, have you guys thought about Alice in Wonderland? And that is very, very US, I suppose, as a theater company. And we thought, obviously that would be a great immersive show. And to Ollie’s Point, it’s a world,

Oliver Lansley:

And it kind of started from there, didn’t it? Going into the idea of going to Wonderland, actually Alice in Wonderland is a really perfect starting place because it’s very modular anyway as a work. It’s a kind of a series of sketches and ideas and characters. So it suited itself to what we were doing. We actually wrote an initial script, which we did a read through of, do you remember that? Do you remember? We got a bunch of actors and we did a read through of it and it was kind of bizarre, but we sort of came away from it going, there’s something that doesn’t quite feel right about the show that we want to make. And we came away from that initial discussion and we cut Alice from Alice in Wonderland. I remember that because basically we realized Alice in a book, Alice is your cipher, is your way to get into the story.

 

But what we wanted to do was allow our audience to be Alice. And you come into Lewis’s Carroll’s study, Alice appears in the mirror and she takes you into Wonderland. But once you go into Wonderland, you get to choose me or drink me, and then you’ll split into two. So it is initial audience of 60, you get split into two, and then from there everyone is assigned a card essentially. So every audience member is a playing card and whichever card you get assigned will dictate your journey on the space. And also all the suits have different characteristics. And so there’s this whole world that you get brought into, but that happens again to get the numbers through. You have 60 people every 15 minutes and then you have 30 plus actors and they’re all on their own tracks. So you’ve got audience one going through and then 15 minutes, the next audience come in.

 

So you’ve got, at any one time, you might have two or three or four audiences in the space, all at different parts of their journeys. And then you’ve got all these different actors all playing. And this is the thing that I think is one of the craziest things for people watching the show is you might see a character in the first five minutes of your show and you’ll talk to them for two minutes and then in the middle of the show you’ll meet that character again and they’ll have another interaction for a minute or two, and then right at the end of the show you will see that character again and they’ll have another interaction. The actors are on this constant 15 minute loop, whereas the audience can go through this journey and then see them at the different points in their story, but in the meantime, the actors are then talking to audience number three or audience number seven, or audience number one.

 

And there’s this crazy scene right at the end of the show, which is the court case at the end of Alice in Wonderland where we have all of these characters popping in and running up and turning up in the court. And it’s just insane because you literally have actors running from their sets across the whole building, going running through Wonderland, getting in, popping up, doing their kind of 32nd moment in the court, ducking down, and then rushing back to where they go. So the Backstage show is probably as interesting, as exciting as what the audience actually get to see.

Charlie Melcher:

What makes something uniquely a terre show?

James Seager:

Good question. I mean, this sounds a little bit bigheaded or bit verbose, but because we’ve been trying to ask this question for about 21 years and only in the last year, I’ve probably thought about it, I got a little bit worried to be totally honest with you that when we created what Ali was saying, the mechanics behind Alice, that other people would copy it I suppose, and use this very unique thing because in 2015, no one in the world had ever done this time code and system of a show to what Ali was saying earlier about how the actors get to one place and how the audience move. And essentially the whole show is run on a computer, but the system is called a time code.

Oliver Lansley:

So basically every single cue in the show or in every different spaces, so say there’s around 40 different sets and spaces and 35 different actors in every lighting queue, every sound queue, every sound effect, every piece of music is all triggered by the time code. And so the time code starts at the beginning of the show and it finishes at the end, it runs all 15 shows. So you could have no actors in there and nothing in there, and it would still be happening. And that again, I think it’s one cue every seven seconds or seven cues every second. I can’t remember which one.

James Seager:

So for many years, because that was very unique to our immersive blend of theater, and I thought, well, maybe that sums us up. But then when other, I guess companies were doing it and fair play to them are doing that, they weren’t doing what we were doing. And I guess the essence of what we are is I guess Holly and I as creators, as directors and as writers, we work with some amazing designers. And you could say on looking at it from afar, our style is quite gothic timber and esque, playful, entertaining, lots of music, lots of puppets, lots of physicality. But essentially what we are as a theater company is story led story-driven, whether we do an immersive show, an outdoor show, a stage show, you can still see similarities between a stage show and immersive show because our importance is on the storytelling and we as a theater company is storytelling. But I think that’s what sums us up.

Oliver Lansley:

Our shows, the audience is always part of our shows, even if it’s a stage show and it’s on a stage, we nearly always break the fourth wall. We engage with the audience and we kind of have a relationship with them. And I think that’s at the heart of what we do. And then so obviously when you then get into the world of immersive, that is opened up onto a whole new level. And so you are the protagonist, as we said, like you are Alice in Alice in Wonderland. What we really try and do is curate an experience which will feel completely unique to every individual audience member, but will feel hopefully equal to all the other audience members. We don’t want one person to have the best night of their life and the other person to go, oh, I spent two hours in an empty room and I couldn’t find anyone, I didn’t find any actors. We want to make sure that we hold everyone’s hand and make sure that everyone gets out of the show what they came to get from it.

Charlie Melcher:

Right. I read one review that said that you’re a company very adept at showing how physicalized storytelling is at the heart of some of the best theater around. And I love that expression of physicalized storytelling. And I wonder, can you explain,

Oliver Lansley:

We try and make our work really three dimensional, and I’ve sort of stopped myself from saying the word immersive then because it’s so overused and it means so many different things to so many people. But I do think immersive is a sort of appropriate word for what we do. We want you to be able to come into our shows and disappear into another world and feel it on every level. And that’s why there’s so many things in our shows, whether it’s live music or puppetry or physicality or storytelling, very all of it is serving the story. And I think the key to that sense of physicalized storytelling, I suppose, is trying to make what we do feel really tangible.

James Seager:

And I think we always address the fact that our shows are our theatrical, I dunno that sounds a bit strange, but we embrace the theatricality of the world. I think every show that we have ever done is almost like a show backstage as it is in front of the stage. And that is because everyone has to pick this up a prop, and it’s very choreographed like that in terms of puppets or instruments or whatever we use to tell the story. We throw it all out there. And I think that’s where the choreography and the movement and the physicalized nature of who we are comes from, I think.

Charlie Melcher:

But you’re also giving that physicality to the audience, so they’re getting to experience it in a multisensory way, in a way that’s more emotional and powerful because they’re living it.

Oliver Lansley:

Yeah, sight, sound, touch, smell, taste again. And I think that’s the magic of immersive and world building. If you create a world you want to be able to play in it and you want to be able to influence it. And there is something about that when you do it well, that you experience it differently as a human because your body is experiencing it in the same way as your mind is under your fingernails. And I think that changes the way that you interact with stories. I think if you think about the way that we consume media, whether it’s computer games, which are very much about you being at the heart of these stories, but even in the way that we experience cinema and music and television, cinema now, if you go to the cinema, it is about the experience. It’s about the kind of surround sound and the IMAX screens and the popcorn or television is now, it’s not something that you are not passive.

 

You have all of these things at your fingertips and you can choose what experience you want. You don’t have to wait for something to be on a certain network at a certain time. Now you are in control. It’s the same with music streaming, but also I think one of the key things is we do it in our own lives in social media, we curate our own stories and our own a avatar in ways that previous generations never had. And you can see you go on Twitter or you go on Instagram or you go on TikTok. Everybody wants to be the protagonist of their own story these days. And I think that is really the heart of why immersive has blown up the way that it has.

Charlie Melcher:

You are so singing my tune. That’s something that I talk a lot about in a repeat theme in this podcast and at future of storytelling in general, I really do believe we’ve entered this age where people no longer want to be passive consumers, they want to be active participants, they want to be co-creators. They want to be heroes in their own adventures. Just another way of saying what you just said, so the complexity of being able to provide that kind of bespoke and carefully curated or choreographed experience for 60 people at a time and then put another 60 people through 15 minutes later, that’s a whole other level. It’s a different part of the brain frankly, than the one that’s doing the puppetry or the choreography or the writing. Talk about how you developed that piece of it and give me some numbers like James, how many people can go through the show in a

James Seager:

Day? On a normal day it’s 660 on a Saturday and a Thursday we have an extra six centuries. So that boosts up numbers, but then also, which we’ve not talked about, we also have another version of the show for kids called Adventures in Wonderland, which is a lot more simple I suppose, but a different version of the show for kids between the ages of four and nine. And we have that on weekends. So Saturday and Sundays and there are like six centuries around about the same type of number of audience, 60. And then on the school holidays, that’s every single day. So on a Saturday we could have 1,400 people on a Saturday, every Saturday.

Charlie Melcher:

So lemme just understand this correctly. So for the children’s show it’s shorter, but you still take 60 people at a time and it’s the same set and

James Seager:

Cast, no different cast, same set, completely different story,

Oliver Lansley:

Slightly less intimidating of Wonderland. Yeah.

James Seager:

And when we say the other Alice Spencer underground is adult, it’s not adult in terms of content, but of course I think in the uk, and I think in the US this is a type of property that is applicable to all. But I think when we started developing this, there’s a lot of maths behind it and there’s a lot of logistics behind it, but the audience are never aware of this and nor should they be. It all started from thinking we want this show to be intimate. And we also want a story,

Oliver Lansley:

Again, if our first biggest thing was realizing that we needed to take the protagonist out of our show to allow the audience to become the protagonist. The second biggest lesson I think was understanding in immersive theater what the audience don’t get to see is as important as what they do get to see. I love that. And because that’s how a world works. You don’t see everything in the world. You have your journey and then you come into the bar and you meet your friend who went off on a different path and they’re like, oh my God, did you see the frog? Or did you see that room where it rained? Or did you see the caterpillar and the great projection stuff? And everyone’s like, no, I didn’t see that. And you realize actually the joy in it is creating a world that feels like it exists whether you are there or not.

Charlie Melcher:

And of course now with that has the fringe benefit of people wanting to come back and do it more than once, right?

James Seager:

Yeah, that’s right. I mean you get people, I think the main thing for me is that immersive theater is asking the question, who are you in this world? What is your role? What is your reason? And every time we’ve brought this show back, we’ve really asked ourselves that question, what does it mean to be a diamond or a heart? And I think every time it’s really interrogating that, so people really affiliate themselves to diamonds or clubs or whoever they are in this show. And that’s great because then there is this camaraderie, but there’s also this kind of rivalry with when they see the space or clubs or whatever. But also as you say, they think that’s amazing journey. What’s it like if I come back and do

Oliver Lansley:

The other one? But the other thing that we haven’t talked about again is that all of our actors play roughly six different characters each partly because we were worried we would send them insane if they had to play the same characters 15 times a night every single night. So basically you have these teams of actors and every night they rotate, but say for example in the tea party, there’ll be a pool of six hatters, six hairs, six door mice, and they all rotate. Once we tried to get a mathematician to figure out the probability of being able to see the same show twice and he couldn’t figure it out because basically every single show, even if you go on exactly the same route, even if you have the exact same card, you are not going to see the same performances from the same actors. So your tea party is going to be completely different with it will have this hatter, this hair, and it’s almost impossible to see the same show twice.

 

And that’s the thing in theater, if you’re going to do a show in the West End for a year or people do it for longer than that, you are doing the same scene over and over and again. And actually weirdly for Alice, it is very rare that you’re going to do the same scene with the same people in the same place. And not to mention the fact that every single audience member is going to bring something to that scene as well and they’re going to react differently. And so it is a really strange organic amorphous beast of a show.

Charlie Melcher:

So tell me about this new space. I mean you said it was 60,000 square feet that you’ve taken, that’s a lot of space for production. And you also mentioned you have a 15 year lease. Yes. Those are two very threatening things for most people in theater. How did you get comfortable taking that

James Seager:

On? I think we were very frustrated that when we did the show before, we only had the residency for six months and the show sold out and so it sold really well and then we had to leave and we were like, this is crazy, why are we leaving? So when we licensed it to China and China did it for two years, we thought, you know what? There is scope to do this. So after it ran for two years there, we started looking for spaces in London and it’s quite hard in any major city to find that amount of space in a really good location. This space used to be where the Eurostar ran from in London when they moved it over to another station King’s Cross, the space has been completely empty and we knew they were redeveloping it, but because it was an underground car park, when people used to park their cars and get on the train to go to France, the car park was down there.

There’s lots of pillars and for a lot of people I think who looked at the space, that was an obstacle. But then for us it was like, well actually we can use these pillars to form the rooms. The landlord wanted to put something that was entertainment. This whole development, the top level is shops and then the ground floor or first floor is restaurants and bars. And then this basement that we’ve got, they didn’t know what to do with it, but they wanted entertainment, they wanted something different and they knew about our show because it’s very close to where the vaults was. And someone showed me it and I looked around and I thought, you know what? This could work. I

Oliver Lansley:

Think it’s reflective also of our ambition for the Labyrinth project, which is the venues called Labyrinth, and also what we believe can be the next transition in the world of immersive theater, which is we are looking at this as the West end or the Broadway of immersive theater. We want to make a show that can compete with the Lion King or Matilda or whatever it is. As we’ve said before, we will be working our butts off to make sure that everyone gets their money’s worth. And I think that is the key to going, how do we compete on a level where this can hopefully remain open for years?

James Seager:

And we touched on it before in terms of audiences have changed, audiences want to be at the forefront of their own experience and adventures as we said. So we found that in 2015, we had so many non theatergoers come to see the show and that was like, wow, this is amazing. I think surely that is the golden ticket in the theater industry to attract people who aren’t into theater to come and see theater. Whether our show is deemed as theater or as an experience, that’s fine. But I think nowadays everyone is much more audiences of changed, as we’ve said. And that speaks to the popularity of immersive and speaks to the popularity of people wanting to try something a little bit different, which is cool.

Charlie Melcher:

Talk to me though about the financial burden. 15 year lease is scary.

James Seager:

Yes, it is. And I think Ollie alluded to it before and I don’t mind sharing because I think we did an opinion piece in the stage newspaper, which is a UK paper that talks to the industry, but they talk to you about your budgets and the budget in 2015 on the show was 600,000 pounds, just over half a million, which for us at that time was massive. And we as a company back then was still raising the money on press night. So the budget in 2017 was double what it was in 2015. We realized we wanted to up things and production values and change the show, but also things change since the pandemic and especially, well, I think this is worldwide. I mean I speaking to some people in America as well and they say, yeah, this is happening over here. Costs are crazy, crazy right now over in the uk. Wood for example, is double the price that it was three years ago. And so the budget has escalated since things like Brexit over here and since European issues, war in Ukraine, all these things have contributed to the budget being quite high.

Oliver Lansley:

Also, we’re trying to build a venue, it was a car park and we’re turning it into a venue that hopefully can run for 15 plus years, but that is plumbing and air conditioning and floors and ceilings,

James Seager:

Which we didn’t have to do before

Oliver Lansley:

And everything.

Charlie Melcher:

And what you didn’t say, but what is the budget now?

James Seager:

Well, I’d say it’s in the region of about 10 billion. So it’s not just the show. So obviously when we did the show before, we were just dry hiring the vaults, so it had all the infrastructure in there. We did have to put air conditioning, sprinkler systems, all this into a venue because we’re thinking long-term and we want Alice to be here as long as possible

Oliver Lansley:

And we’re building. Yeah, I mean that’s the difference. If you’re building a show that is going to close in six months or one that you’re trying to keep open, you have to invest, have a different quality of build.

Charlie Melcher:

I feel like there’s such a merging of the craft of theater with operational excellence or innovation because you’re so hands-on literally from writing it to directing it, to producing it, have been able to solve for both of those challenges. And that’s needed to be able to get to an immersive theater experience that’s so intimate and personalized and the audience is held, but to do it at scale where it can actually be profitable and you can solve that problem of throughput, which everyone struggles so terribly with. Do you agree? How is it that you guys have been able to solve for both sides?

James Seager:

It’s just our upbringing. When I say upbringing, I mean theater upbringing at the Edinburgh Fringe, the theater company started at the Edinburgh Fringe, and I dunno whether people have been there, but it’s an amazing experience, amazing festival, the biggest festival in the world,

Oliver Lansley:

Very immersive.

James Seager:

But we started doing shows there. So Ollie had this crazy idea to put on a show at the Edinburgh Fringe and he just grabbed me and some other friends and we put on a show there 21 years ago. But then we had the thirst for it and then we were like, let’s go back and do another show really well. And then all friends and we were just all digging in deep of writing, directing, acting. Both of us we’re doing all of that. Sometimes both of us were in the show as actors or directors. You had to

Oliver Lansley:

Do everything. You had to do the flyering and the PR and the marketing and the lighting design and the sound design and everything.

James Seager:

And that was our education, our learning to be producers. So we became producers without realizing it. But sometimes people, young people or anyone say, what does a producer do? And well, the answer is everything really, but they

Oliver Lansley:

Make things happen.

James Seager:

And it’s like suddenly we realized only after about seven years of doing this up in Edinburgh, oh we are producers. It was that late.

Oliver Lansley:

A lot of producers, the way they produces go, I need this thing done. Who’s the best? Which is usually the most expensive person that does this thing. Let’s hire them. And that can work. But when you are doing something which is so holistic and interconnected, hiring individual people who do these things in a vacuum or certainly in the world of conventional theater, and this is how we do this and this is how it works and this is how this works, is not always the best way to do things. When you are creating something that is different and is new and you need to be able to explore other avenues and think outside the box and sometimes do things in a way that isn’t the way that it normally

James Seager:

Gets started, I think we’ve always had an understanding from Edinburgh that if that show financially didn’t work then game over, we wouldn’t be doing it next year. And we’ve just known that even subconsciously in creating our immersive shows. And Alice of when we were co-producing this show, we were like, okay, we’ve got 60 people in. And we’re like, well, we need more than that. We just know because if it didn’t work financially, we wouldn’t be able to. Yeah,

Oliver Lansley:

We never had those. We’ve never had rich patrons. We’ve never been lucky enough to be one of those big companies where we have kind of rich people who love what they do and just pays for it. And whether it works or not, we’ve always had to scrape to find the money and go the money that you make from show A pays for show B and then you hope to make it a little bit more and then that pays for the next show. So I think we’d have really enjoyed having rich patrons giving us, but we would be very different artists if that had happened. But we probably have less gray hair

Charlie Melcher:

Even though this seems to be a tremendous focus. It’s not the only thing that you’re working on. You both have active lives outside of this as well.

Oliver Lansley:

The thing that drives us is just the desire to do it and the interest in telling stories. As a theater company, we still make stage shows. We’ve got a stage show opening just around the corner in the South Bank, which is a musical called The House with Chicken Legs based on a bestselling book. And that is a proper stage musical,

James Seager:

Proper

Oliver Lansley:

Old

Charlie Melcher:

School, old

Oliver Lansley:

School on a stage. We got to do that recently and we were sitting there in a theater being like, oh God, this is, so there are lights and there are things and there was a comfy chairs like, oh this is such God. Remember when we just made shows in theaters?

Charlie Melcher:

Luxury.

Oliver Lansley:

Yeah, complete luxury. But then also we are doing other stuff in the immersive world. We are doing a show in Vegas in Las Vegas, which we’re going to be,

Charlie Melcher:

Tell me more.

James Seager:

Well hopefully we’re at that stage of negotiations, but

Oliver Lansley:

It’s looking very positive. We’re in the final stages of getting that in place. But if that happens, that will happen next year. And again, that becomes about a completely new audience and a completely new experience and going, how do we create something that fits into that world?

James Seager:

We are busy not just on Alice and the lab of the project, but there’s Ollie alluded there, there’s lots of little things bubbling and there’s lots of exciting things as well of where can immersive theater to go next. And that’s exciting for us. Not just technology but in different genres, which we’re exploring at the moment and also in America as well. We’ve done only a few experiences over there, so it is quite exciting to hopefully do this new show in Vegas next year and to do other shows.

Oliver Lansley:

Also, we need collaborators to help us pay for these crazy expensive shows. So if you want us, we are here, please contact us. We’re available for parties and bar mitzvahs.

Charlie Melcher:

Well gentlemen, I can’t wait to see what you do next and to come back for the grand opening. By the way, when are you scheduled to open here?

James Seager:

So we are just confirming those dates, but it looks like the summer next year it could be slightly ahead. I mean there’s been a lot of complications with turning a car park, an underground car park into a fully functioning venue. When it’s underground. We are running water and electricity and heating. So there’s been a few delays, but big projects I’ve learned building projects are sometimes delayed, but it is looking around about the summertime 2024.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, we can’t wait to go down whatever rabbit holes you gentlemen design. I just want to say thank you for joining me today and huge fans and look forward to more from Ter.

James Seager:

Thank you very much. Thank you very

Oliver Lansley:

Much. And you say our name much better than

James Seager:

Either of us. It’s been great. Thank you very much.

Charlie Melcher:

I’m Charlie Melcher and this has been The Future of Storytelling podcast. Thanks for joining me. We at FoST are dedicated to bringing you the latest innovations in entertainment, technology, media marketing, and countless other industries where storytelling is key. If you find the podcast to be valuable, please consider subscribing and recommending us to a friend. We’d really appreciate it. We also have a free monthly newsletter, FoST in Thought, and an annual membership program, the FoST Explorers Club. You can learn more about both on our website@fost.org. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, charts and leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.