Theatre Journal

While several companies have experimented with virtual reality (VR) performance, The Under Presents: The Tempest signals an intention to move VR theatrical productions from passive viewing of performances captured with the help of 360 cameras to productions with distinct attention to scenography, performance, and immersion. Devised by the game company Tender Claws and the performance group PieHole, The Under Presents premiered originally as a game where live actors occasionally insert themselves into the game play. Lauded as one of the most innovative interactive games for the Oculus Quest, a stand-alone VR headset, The Under Presents features a post-apocalyptic world for players to explore where live actors can interact with the players in a post-apocalyptic cabaret. After the start of the pandemic, the creative team involved with The Under Presents undertook a more traditional theatre piece by presenting an immersive version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In the midst of myriad filmed and Zoom productions, this performance stands out not only for its commentary on the pandemic, but for the potential it demonstrates for an experience unfettered from the constraints of the physical world both in body and place through VR.

The Under Presents: The Tempest is not a strict production of Shakespeare’s work, but rather, in the spirit of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, the audience wanders through a series of virtual spaces that calls to mind the locations in The Tempest through the eyes of Prospero. With VR’s ability to shift locations with just the click of a button, audience members could interact with all these landscapes and each [End Page 236] other through their VR device while in their living rooms, and the rest of the audience and the guide could see and respond to their actions. Devised by the PieHole ensemble, each performance was led by a guide who slipped in and out of the role of Prospero, sometimes referring to himself or herself as an actor who had once played the role while at other times fully embracing Prospero’s persona. Through seven locations—an abandoned theatre lobby, a campfire at a house in the hills outside Los Angeles, the rough seas, a “mental palace” full of artifacts from the story, an open field, a demonic dinner table, and the ruins of a temple—the guide revealed the story of The Tempest through improvisations with the audience members, sometimes explicitly using the Shakespearean text and at other times using discussions of quarantines and cancelled productions to tell the tale.

Within the VR space, the performance began in the Decameron Theatre, a dilapidated structure being swallowed by the surrounding desert and darkness. Its lobby looked as if the doors had been left open for some time, with drifts of sand accumulating around the room. Hidden in the sand, glass jars twinkled and beckoned, and once a user picked them up, they could look through them to see the hidden, parallel world of The Tempest. The lobby, bound by the edges of the desert, felt finite, yet the specific trick of the twinkling glass bottles, unavailable in the physical world, made the exploration seem infinite, rather like looking out of the window during quarantine. The glass bottles gave a greenish, monsterish glow to the images of costumes under glass from some forgotten production, sets growing through the floor of the lobby, and portals to the world of The Tempest. The laws normally governing a physical space suggested by the virtual Decameron Theatre no longer applied, and the walls did not represent confinement as much as the possibility of adventure in another world.

This exploration was done in isolation. While an audience member could see others in the lobby, there was little if any interaction among the participants. Each participant was...