Love Lust Lost | Broad Encounters

Image: Jade Ellis. Cover image: Peter Wallis

Broad Encounters’ new show, Love Lust Lost, completely transports the audience into an enchanting and peculiar deep sea wonderland. Stories from Jules Verne, Hans Christian Anderson and Joseph Conrad collide in an immersive theatre experience with a bit of everything. Your journey begins from the moment you arrive, with a shipyard foyer area, and a character roaming around interacting with patrons. Audience members are invited to don a costume jacket to become part of the crew, and are sent into the depths of the ocean. 

At the beginning of the show, you are given the choice of two paths, and from there Broad Encounters delivers an immersive experience where you as an audience member get real autonomy over where you go and what you see at nearly every turn. No two journeys through this strange world are the same. There is so much going on during this show, with scenes playing out in different rooms simultaneously that I believe it’s impossible to be bored for even a moment. The time I spent there flew by. The show is in the same building as A Midnight Visit, but once you step inside it is completely unrecognisable - I could spend hours just exploring the set without any performances. The set has literally hundreds of items that help tell the story and provide an endless stream of visual intrigue. 

Image: Jade Ellis

Love Lust Lost retains the dreamlike quality that was so wondrous in A Midnight Visit, but with more of a narrative than their previous show. Like a Midnight Visit, many lines performed by the cast are taken from preexisting works. Texts that might feel familiar are recontextualised in a new story with enough originality to make it feel fresh and exciting. As a bit of a nerd, it was fun for me to think about what I saw in the show afterwards and relate it back to those preexisting works, but I believe this show would be equally fun for you if you have no idea who Hans Christian Anderson was. As well as literary references, there is a bit of pop culture: at one point I was listening to what I thought was a poem until I realised it was actually a different presentation of the lyrics to a pop song. 

Every character in Love Lust Lost is unique and intense, with each performer bringing a tremendous amount of energy to their role. My personal favourites were Asher Bowen as Sandy and Kristian Santic as The Mariner. Asher is an incredible mover – I adored her contemporary dance scene that happens in one of the larger spaces, she was so expressive and fluid. Without giving too much away, Kristian's scene in a shipping container with dead fish is one of the strangest things (in the best way) I have seen in some time. By the nature of the performance, there were characters whose stories I saw very little of, and I am keen to go again to see what they have to offer. 

This desire to return immediately to a show I have just seen is a trait I feel is unique to immersive theatre. Most theatre tickets will send you to witness a story, while a ticket to Love Lust Lost is a ticket to send you into a new world. A must-sea.