Shelter | The Drawer Productions
Shelter: The Immersive Experience by The Drawer Productions had a very mysterious atmosphere from right in the beginning. I hadn’t been to see any immersive theatre before and the neon lighting, 80’s music and waiver that I had to sign before seeing the show definitely helped build up a sense of anticipation.
There was a good sized audience gathered in the lobby when a loud and peppy real estate agent spoke up and invited Sophie (Keely Woods), the main character who had been mingling with the audience, to come inside the bunker she had inherited from her mother. The audience was introduced to the real estate agent as ‘friends coming with her for moral support’ and we were led through a door into a massive warehouse space, and from there quickly through to a fully enclosed house.
The house was fully furnished and made up of several connected rooms. There were bookshelves full of books and trinkets, board games on the coffee table and a huge amount of art supplies and art on the walls. Because of how many people were in the audience it was difficult to tell at first who was acting and who was just watching. But after a few minutes I saw that the space was being lived in by a family of four, Mum (Bridget Webb) and Dad (Dmitri Politis) and two kids, Mandy (Lola Bond) and Miles (Oscar O’Brian). As well as Sophie who was looking around the bunker with the audience, as if she were seeing it for the first time.
From there the story played out piece by piece, with characters inhabiting the same space but in different times and talking about family and forgiveness. I found the family dynamics really believable, particularly between the two siblings, and Lola’s performance as Mandy stood out to me in particular. She portrayed the conflict between her sheltered upbringing and desire to explore and take risks really well.
One of the most interesting things about Shelter was looking at how different audience members were directed through the space and interacted with it. The lighting and sound was used really effectively to direct me and I really liked being pulled around the space by voices from another room, coloured flashes of light or a tv being turned on. On top of this, because there was so much to look at and dig through, as well as sometimes multiple scenes being done at once, you had a lot of power as an individual audience member to shape your view of the story. I enjoyed following the two siblings around, and I found myself barely paying attention to Sophie, the character who was in the scene with us.
There were some other audience members who seemed far more interested in rummaging through every drawer and bookshelf, gathering clues from letters and small details around the house. I did end up finding this really distracting and I thought there was a scavenger hunt I was supposed to be doing for almost half an hour before I realised that it was optional and that the main story was just happening through the actors. I did find myself wishing that there was a bit more space to read things around in the space, like characters diaries, between scenes.
Shelter had some really fun twists and turns and I definitely found myself mumbling “Cool” out loud while discovering them. I was initially a little bit skeptical of audience interaction in immersive theater, and I didn’t feel super engaged by the realestate framing device. However, I really enjoyed the immersive setting and I think actually moving in the space really added to the authentic feelings of the story. I also loved how the immersive aspects of the character interactions meant that the story was able to be told through multiple time periods. The immersive aspect of the space really smoothed the different timelines together and made it coherent and easy and fun to watch.
