Interview: Leo Doulton on The Uncanny Things Trilogy

Photo: Virtually Opera

Immersive Rumours: Hi Leo. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. Do you mind introducing yourself and telling us a bit about Virtually Opera?

Leo Doulton: Hi, I'm Leo. I'm Artistic Director of Virtually Opera and creator of the Uncanny Things Trilogy. I have been working in immersive/interactive theatre since 2019 and in the arts more generally for over a decade now, which is a terrifying thought.

I've been experimenting within interactive/immersive theatre, particularly through my work as Associate Creative Director of The Key of Dreams, and in my own work with Virtually Opera. With the latter, we've been experimenting with interactive, immersive opera. That is to say, a fusion of the two forms. Virtually Opera's mission statement is to create beautiful entertainment through fusion opera. I love going to something and having a good time, but also being devastatingly moved, and that's what Virtually Opera exists to try and do.

Virtually Opera's own little history is that in 2017, it was set up initially making cinematically filmed opera that we’d put on YouTube. No one watched it because who watches anything that's on YouTube? In 2019, I had a catalogue of, I think, just under a hundred different cinematically filmed operas where the makers weren't filming it like a stage show - they'd sat down and made a bloody movie. Around the same time, I'd started doing these experiments in interactive/immersive opera. That ended up being a really interesting and rewarding strand of work. It started off with a weird little show called ‘We Sing I Sang’. The audience is a hive mind, essentially, deciding what a collective unconscious does as it flees its dying home world.

A big part of what Virtually Opera’s interactive work is about is the sense that humans care about stuff and, generally speaking, want to at least try to be decent. Trusting that if you give a group of people the chance to build a community together, they're going to take it seriously, as long as you ask them to, is generally something we found pays off. 

IR: We’re speaking today about The Uncanny Things trilogy, which is coming to COLAB Tower next month. Can you give us an overview of what all three of those shows entail?

Leo: The Uncanny Things Trilogy is a set of shows all taking place in the same world, a world much like our own, except that the supernatural is real and it's a presence. When you hear a voice just on the edge of hearing, when you see something out of the corner of your eye, maybe it's not an Uncanny Thing, but it possibly is. Each show works as a standalone piece, and in all of them, you are negotiating with these Uncanny Things to try and serve your community and yourself. 

They're all variants on a theme of ritual, but it might be that this is a very solemn ritual, it might be that it’s an ecstatic ritual, and then some of them are much darker, more intense rituals, and if you don't handle it well, consequences can happen. You don't have to sing, incidentally. People often ask that. Singing is very much not required, although a remarkable number of people do choose to, which is charming when you have someone joining in that way.

Photo: Charley Ipsen

IR: What was the inspiration for the first show in the trilogy, Come Bargain With Uncanny Things?

Leo: It came from various places. I'd been working in contemporary opera for about five years at that point. There are things I love about contemporary opera, but there are things I find frustrating, such as the tradition of being a form for specialist audiences, which leads to a lot of it being fairly difficult for outsiders to come into. As a result, if you don't know the tradition, maybe you don't want to come. I sometimes use the parallel of if you are giving advice to a young person who’s going, ‘Why doesn't anyone I want to date like me?’ You don't go, ‘Keep doing the same thing, but louder!’ You say, ‘Maybe you need to go and brush your teeth.’

Similarly, I fell in love with interactive/immersive theatre with Parabolic Theatre's Crisis, What Crisis? The agency and use of dramatic structures to tell stories were really interesting to me. I learnt a lot from how Parabolic put on shows. 

I also have a deep interest in epic stories from around the world and the different narrative structures that you might find in them. The Kalevala, for example, has one narrative structure, which is, you have three different characters, and their stories are basically kind of separate, then occasionally they hang out together. You see that in The Lord of the Rings - the Fellowship is together, and then Frodo and Sam do their thing, and Aragorn goes and does their thing. Sometimes they reunite, and sometimes they go away. Tolkien is obviously influenced by that structure. How do you take a story structure and make it do something ritualistic? Well, you take a story structure that's not designed to be about winning. It's about relating to things.

IR: Come Bargain With Uncanny Things had a two-week run at COLAB Tavern back in 2022. How was it having an audience come in and live in that world?

Leo: That’s kind of why we're bringing it back. Because it was really fun. In that version of the show, we got to really understand the different things people wanted to do. People would come in, and they'd really care about it, to the extent that people started coming back. Which we were delighted by, but also we weren't necessarily expecting that.

We discovered ways that the world would tend to grow around what different people suggested and how flexible we could be. We discovered how creative people could be in this space and how open they would be to the invitation of ‘Would you like to come and help your neighbours?’ That's the basic question Come Bargain asks you. It's just small local problems. You're not here to save the world, and people did want that. They didn't care about winning. They just cared about relating.

Photo: Charley Ipsen

IR: It's interesting that you focused on creating a relatively low-stakes environment for the show to exist in. That seems to go against what most other experiences do.

Leo: I think for certain genres, it's absolutely the right thing to do. If you're doing a show about war, your stakes are life and death. I would say, however, the audience generally speaking assumes you're not going to murder one of your performers, which makes it quite hard to make those stakes believable.

The stakes of ‘I am worried about my neighbour who’s sick’ are small. It's much easier to play that. I don't know you well enough to go, ‘Do you have a member of your family who is maybe elderly or vulnerable?’ but I suspect the answer is yes, because you're a human being. You and I have both reached an age where we are aware that we are mortal. Therefore, if you make the scales ‘I'm a human being and that's sometimes hard’, it means something to people.

IR: Following on from Come Bargain, there was Come Worship Our Uncanny King, which was performed at Voidspace Live in 2024. Did you want to start working on that show as soon as you finished the run of Come Bargain?

Leo: Initially after Come Bargain, I thought, ‘Well, that's done. I'd like to bring Come Bargain back someday, and maybe we can have a show where you see the community develop based on what the previous show did’. I thought we'd just do it nice and straightforward and easily. This would have been sensible. I ended up having other work come up, which was delightful. Thank you to everyone who did that, but it meant the show sat in the back of my head for a little while.

We took a lot of what we had seen in Come Bargain’s audience, where there were some people who were weirdly enthusiastic about doing what the Uncanny Thing wanted. Come Worship is a show for those people. It came out of that sense of people being invested in this world.

The entire world-building of Come Bargain is designed to support this question of ‘How do we relate to the Uncanny Thing?’ Metaphorically, how do we relate to the world, our community, and each other in this space? In that show, you do that as equals. In Come Worship Our Uncanny King, you do that from a position of grotesquely less power because you have the Uncanny King there. That's an interesting situation to put people in.

Photo: Claire Shovelton

IR: Come Murder An Uncanny Thing is being performed for the first time in front of an audience at COLAB Tower. Does that give you any trepidation?

Leo: You are more than experienced enough to know that if I said anything other than yes, I'd be lying. Obviously, it causes trepidation. A lot of the individual mechanics, if you have been to the weird little Fringe shows I've done over the past few years, will be familiar. There's one mechanic of the audience shaping how a certain conversation plays out between the Uncanny Thing and the audience through very light touch musical elements, which people may have seen remarkably well at Into The Dreamlands last year at the London Lovecraft Festival.

There's another mechanic for how do you punish the Uncanny Thing? This is the show where you have power over it, after all, which was something I developed in residency at Theatre Deli in 2023. The overall structure is, I think, solid. There is, of course, trepidation because maybe all of these things come together, and they go clunk.

This is probably where it's worth mentioning the performance team. Fundamentally, this is a show about humans being human together. The mechanics are only a means to that end. I have absolute confidence that the ensemble we have is going to be able to bring something beautiful to that of ‘Here's a group of people who've got together to decide to murder a supernatural creature'. There are mechanics around it, and there are specific ways you're doing that, but really, the interesting thing is how are you going to occupy the space where you have agreed to murder something.

IR: Across all three shows, there’s a shifting power balance between the audience and the Uncanny Thing.  What about that idea is so appealing to you as a creator?

Leo: I have to credit Katy Naylor of Voidspace for the insight of me being interested in power as a theme. She's been following my work for a while and just said that very casually. It explains a lot of things. I have a background in History, and a lot of my education was by Marxian historians who are not Marxists, but they are interested in similar ideas of class dynamics, economic dynamics, and who holds power in a society and why.

We live in an age of climate change. We live in a world where you turn on the news, and basically every day, the world is more powerful than you. You cannot individually do anything about climate change. You have to live with it. Similarly, for many people, the government is more powerful than you in ways you can't necessarily understand. It just is. How do you live with that?

You and I have just had a coffee and green tea. We live in a world where, by virtue of the fact we have a fairly small amount of capital by the standards of our society, there is someone on the other side of the world who has picked those things, put them in a cup, and I can just get them to do that by spending £3. I have power over my world. What do I do with it?

That's an interesting set of questions for those metaphors of how do you relate to the world, the community, and each other? We have no power against the climate, but we also do have power over nature. We have no power against humans with power, but we also do have power over other humans.

I will say, you don't have to think about any of those things at the show. Just come and beat the shit out of an Uncanny Thing...

Photo: Charley Ipsen

IR: How does opera fit within all three of the shows?

Leo: As with immersive, there are competing definitions of what is opera. This show goes, ‘This is a world of constant music. The music is improvised to reflect that world's story’. We know that there are certain motifs, certain melodies, and certain harmonies that are associated with different things. If, for example, you make the worlds more Uncanny, more supernatural, you might notice that the music suddenly gets a bit more crunchy and weird because that's one of the things we've got in the vocabulary of music for the show. That's all in response to how the audience changed the world. It's a way of expressing there's magic happening and showing the world shifting. This is drama about the community and their world, not about the characters..

In the fiction of the world, the Uncanny Things don't like human voices, but they respond really well to singing. If you are one of the Bargainers, your job professionally is to control these things and to negotiate with them. You sing to it, and you sing while you're conducting this ritual. The community doesn't have to sing because why would they? They're not professional Bargainers, and also because I'm not an arsehole.

IR: What were the audience reactions to Come Bargain With Uncanny Things like from those who were previously unfamiliar with opera?

Leo: I think they preferred it to the opera people. I think for them, they were able to understand the idea of ‘I’m meant to be a person in this world, and I'm acting as a human being with agency because we have free will.’ They just got that. For them, the music was just like, ‘Oh, that's super cool, there's this person who is professionally singing’.

Weirdly, some of the opera people got super into it and were like, ‘Oh, I'm actually allowed to be a human being while being in the show. That's super cool. I've never had that before.’ There were other people who sat down and just went, ‘Well, I just want to watch it. I know I came to this interactive, immersive opera, but I'm confused by both the fact that I'm in the world and I'm being expected to do stuff.’

Some people came and, admittedly, they said that this isn't opera because they felt the role of the music was not sufficiently expressing the drama of the story. Which was interesting. There are definitely some operas that don't fit within this definition, and that's a conversation that I can have until the cows come home.

Photo: Virtually Opera

IR: So those elements of the Uncanny Things Trilogy shouldn’t be a turn-off to those intimidated about going to anything labelled ‘opera’?

Leo: For the specific thing we're trying to make, the world is told through music, the world is supernatural, and the supernatural is achieved through music. But we're doing all of that work for you. The music is designed for that purpose, which means it is easy and welcoming. If the main thing you listen to is Chappell Roan, great! Come along. You don't need to know shit about opera to come. It's an unreasonable expectation fundamentally.

The opera is a tool towards telling the story and creating the experience. It's not designed as a test of ‘Are you opera enough?’. Let's say you have a relative who goes to church, or you've been to church for Christmas. In that environment, it makes total sense that at some point a guy comes out and does a hymn. But you don't have to know about it to understand that when you do rituals, people sing. There is something weird that happens with music, and we all recognise that, whatever music we listen to.

IR: If there's one takeaway you'd want people to take from attending The Uncanny Things Trilogy, what would it be?

Leo: I want them to walk away feeling like they've been welcomed and that they've been human. I want people to come away feeling like they've been in a community and they've done something important. Whether that is you having worshipped the King, you have Bargained, or you have Murdered. 

Ultimately, the title says Uncanny Things, but that is only because by relating to the Uncanny Things, hopefully you do something deeply human. Also, I hope they've genuinely had a good time. The shows should be fun in the proper sense of the word. It's not just ‘I've engaged with content and it was fun’, but ‘I got to be a human being and be entertained, and that's just really fucking important sometimes.’

Photo: Claire Shovelton

Review: The Uncanny Things Trilogy by Virtually Opera

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The Uncanny Things Trilogy runs from 4th March to 30th March 2025 at COLAB Tower near London Bridge. Standard tickets for each show are priced at £45, and tickets are available for all three shows as a bundle for £105. For more info and to book tickets, visit designmynight.com