Review: DARKFIELD AT THE DITCH, Shoreditch Town Hall
Photo credit: Mihaela Bodlovic
Darkfield are known for their innovative immersive experiences, based around 360 audio, binaural sounds and sensory effects. Regulars at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival may have spotted their shipping containers dotted around Summerhall. Their latest residency in the disused basement of Shoreditch Town Hall showcases four audio experiences that unfurl in complete darkness and worm into your brain with existential questions about mortality, loneliness and the self.
‘The Ditch’ is an atmospheric space – a network of cold, bare rooms, radiating off a central makeshift bar. Each of the four experiences are timed with military precision, with at least four iterations of each throughout the evening. The resulting traffic in the bar space, when combined with the dim lighting and haze, is hectic. If not deliberate, this is quite a happy accident, teeing up the audience to enter the controlled sensory deprivation of the shows.
Three of the four experiences are part of the ‘Darkfield Radio’ series – audio narratives that hinge around facets of the human condition. Our first experience was Double, which seats you opposite a partner in the dark during a visceral and unnerving story about familiarity and alienation. This is quite an intense leap into the Darkfield world, exploring the Capgras delusion, a terrifying condition in which the sufferer is convinced that a loved one has been replaced by an exact replica with malign intentions.
Your experience of this twisted thought experiment might vary depending on your partner – if you’ve brought your partner along, you might feel considerably more unsettled and disturbed by the turn of events than if you are seated opposite a stranger perhaps?
Visitors similarly revolves around the relationship between two people in a lonely and longing ghost story. Compared to the squelching gore of Double, there is a quieter terror and prickling sadness to Visitors. Compounded with the absolute, suffocating darkness of your surroundings, this story of possession is a curiously out-of-body experience.
The headline piece – Arcade – is a break and relief from the quiet horror of the radio series. This is a choose-your-own-adventure experience which gives you more autonomy as you stand at the controls of an arcade machine and navigate your way through an ambiguous political uprising. The lore is uncertain and the plot secondary to the sensory experience.
The experience that rounded off our evening was the almost unbearably creepy Eternal. The binaural sound and 360 audio in this piece in particular is incredible – the depth layering of sound making it feel as though the voices might reach out from the void and grasp you by the throat.
Thrillingly unsettling but manageable in tight 20-minute chunks, Darkfield at the Ditch is a completely unique selection of experiences. A word of caution that if you are likely to be anxious, you must be confident in speaking up as the Front of House ushers (perhaps too rushed for time and bogged down with ticket admin) do not give much time or space for you to take up their offer of trigger warning summaries.
All in all, an unmissable immersive experience.
**** Four stars
Reviewed by: Livvy Perrett
Darkfield at the Ditch plays at Shoreditch Town Hall until 12 April, with further info here.
