Review: DARKFIELD at The Ditch at Shoreditch Town Hall ★

When 20 minutes feels so long you’re begging for an interval – don’t waste your time with this uncaring technological mirage.

★ DARKFIELD at The Ditch | Shoreditch Town Hall | 1-12 April 2025

DARKFIELD at The Ditch is an impressive technical accomplishment, but it’s wrecked by bad writing and a complete lack of care for its audience participants. It promises us agency, but denies any meaningful application of it at every step, leading to an unfulfilling, disappointing and often cruel experience.

DARKFIELD at The Ditch is hosted by immersive audio company Darkfield. They specialize in evocatively designed binaural sound performances, where audience participants are immersed in an audio-based story played to them in complete darkness. Hosted in the beautifully dilapidated basement of Shoreditch Town Hall, this showcase presents four of their immersive projects: Headliner ARCADE, their newest show, along with existing pieces VISITORS, ETERNAL, and DOUBLE. The shows run on a rotating schedule in different rooms around the venue, with each lasting around 20-30 minutes. In between, guests can soak up the atmosphere of the speakeasy-meets-arcade space, try their luck at rows of old pinball and arcade videogame machines, grab a drink, and maybe even catch some live music or a DJ as the night goes on. On our visit, we experienced ARCADE and VISITORS, the latter of which is a two-person show that must be explored with a companion. In ARCADE, each participant plays as Milk, an amnesiac fighter in an endless war, trying to find your way out. In VISITORS, participants converse with a pair of ghosts with sinister intentions. 

Before we get into why we were so completely turned off by this experience, it’s worth talking about how technologically impressive these pieces are. ARCADE has visitors take their place in front of a videogame arcade machine. Once they’ve placed their headphones on, they’re plunged into the dark to start their journey as Milk. We navigate the world and make choices through a button on the arcade, and occasionally by inserting a token into a slot on the side of the machine. These interactive elements are immediately picked up in the story we hear, creating seamless player interactions with no noticeable lag or inconsistency. VISITORS sees us in two worn-out armchairs, listening more passively in the dark as the ghosts in our headphones guide us through its story. The sound design for both pieces is full and visceral, creating a complete world and keeping you there. It’s a dramatic and, to our knowledge, fairly unique form, executed with all the technical skill it needs to create immersion and limited participatory interaction with very limited props, people, and set.

Unfortunately, Darkfield’s shows waste the potential of this form. Their core problem is a combo of a lack of care for their audiences, and a disrespect for any meaningful participant agency, both made worse by pointlessly violent content and bland, characterless writing.

To start with, both pieces allow almost no room to refuse any part of the performance once you’ve started, or to negotiate the extent of your participation. Because the material in our headphones is pre-recorded, and for safety reasons we’re asked not to move in the complete dark, the only way to opt out once you’ve begun is to take off your headphones and wait for the experience to end. We’re not told exactly what will happen at the start of the piece, only at most certain actions we MAY be asked to take. We’re then given a 30 second window to decide whether we’re comfortable proceeding, which is our only option to refuse other than taking the headphones off. There’s a moment in VISITORS that exemplifies this: one participant is asked to do something that fundamentally changes the way the two participants experience the piece in relation to each other. However, only one of the participants is made aware of the possibility of this happening before the show starts, meaning both people can’t have a meaningful conversation, or even physically gesture to each other, about whether or not they consent to this shift in the way they experience the show together, even within the short window provided. Both ARCADE and VISITORS engage with seriously violent and potentially traumatic content, only some elements of which are mentioned in the relatively sparse trigger warnings provided. To cut off any possibility of partial refusal, or any chance for participants to engage with the pre-recorded work on their terms (as opposed to only in the singular way Darkfield dictates) feels utterly uncaring for the needs of participants asked to carry out key tasks to make these shows work. It shows a disregard for any chance for participants to shape the experience, and their engagement with it, to what feels appropriate for them beyond an all-or-nothing binary, while robbing them of key information needed to make that choice in an informed way.

In this way and more, both shows promise participants agency over their experience while actively thwarting any ability to meaningfully exercise it at every step of the way. ARCADE is especially guilty of this: Its setup is that you can press a button to make yes or no decisions as audience-perspective character Milk, navigating the show’s violent world. However, these decisions are made meaningless in a few ways. You have only a second to make them, and often little to no warning as to when a moment where you can make a decision is coming. This means during any moments where you settle back into being the passive listener the piece leaves you as outside those button-pushing moments, you risk missing out on one of the limited instances you have to express your agency in the piece if you’re not paying constant attention. More damaging, however, is the lack of information about what your choices mean. As you make your snap judgements, your amnesiac protagonist self almost never has any information about the potential consequences of any of their actions. The density of information thrown at you as a player participant means you’re never able to build a meaningful picture of the world, and where you and your choices fit in it. Instead, you’re left guessing, spending the entire time you’re in the show hoping to pick an interesting route through the story without any context for what your yes or no choices have led to. This effect gets strengthened as characters within the story sometimes actively ignore your choices, going ahead or refusing you seemingly regardless of what you say (or in many cases, are dead so quickly within your meeting them that your conversations and relationships with them have no long term impact on what happens next anyway). In this way, ARCADE gives you as a player the appearance of agency over your path through it, without allowing for any meaningful expression of it, leaving you once again entirely at the mercy of the show’s creators, even as they promise you that you can shape the experience.

This promise of agency expressed with so little context or ability to negotiate your engagement with the show that it becomes meaningless is bad enough, but it’s made almost cruel by the violence of both ARCADE and VISITOR’s content. This is Hamish, jumping in to solo for a second – as a side note, I’m a huge audio-drama horror fan. I love nothing more than walking home after work, listening to a nice relaxing story of someone getting horribly and gruesomely devoured by their computer. So when I say the violence of these shows is cruel, it’s not because they contain content that feels uncomfortable or harsh. It’s because their violence seems to have no deeper goal than to shock and hurt. Both shows play on violence and loss of control – ARCADE through constant, numbing and blunt wartime hurt, and VISITORS through fears of loss, separation and death. But there’s no humanity to ground this violence in. There’s no characters to grieve, no tragedy of circumstance to curse, no hope of escape or possibility of something better to keep you or any of the other characters you hear from going. In both shows there’s only violence, and fear, and the promise of more violence and fear. Because of this, when each show’s not actively pursuing this kind of shock, its writing doesn’t have anything interesting to offer. They become bland, uninteresting, without characters or goals to care for or wonder about, and you find yourself waiting for these annoying plot vehicle characters to get on with it so you can get out of here to something more interesting. 

This fear and violence for the sake of shock and ‘edge-factor’ only feels particularly disrespectful to place audiences in given the lack of any aesthetic distance the show’s immersive, drop-you-in-the-story experience creates. It asks them to experience awful, horrible things being done to them and to those around them with a minimum of framing to remind them that this is fiction, for no reason other than to experience awful, horrible things being done to them. Then they’re spat back out into the lobby, without a shred of available care for what they’ve just experienced. This approach to placing participants in a fictionalized experience of violence feels cruel, un-useful, and artistically uninteresting, and left us feeling little more than annoyed, on-edge, and bored.

If you’re concerned about the sharp right global turn taken politically in recent years, here is your representation of it in art. It’s an isolating and individualized experience that de-mobilizes and disempowers. It fails to care. It implies that consent cannot be withdrawn once given. It provides inadequate content warnings. Because we all need to suck it up, right? Grin and bear it? In a time when we need collective action and community more than ever, Darkfield makes you feel alone and hopeless within a crowd of people. 

In conclusion, DARKFIELD at The Ditch promises a performance form worth watching, but fails to deliver any more than false promises of agency, a lack of care, and cheap hits of shock without any more interesting purpose.

Mary & Hamish

Mary Tooley (she/her) is a performer, producer, facilitator, and theatre maker with a passion for cultivating collaborative and creative spaces of care and community. As a scholar focussed on the political and personal potential of practices of feminist refusal, she programs provocative socially-engaged work and women’s workshops that challenge the idea of what theatre can be. Her performance practice finds majesty in the mess. She created and starred in two comedic participatory one-woman productions called Belly Flop and Polish Me Up? at BLOC Venue in London. She is a Venue Manager for Box Office & Reception at Wilton’s Music Hall. She produced Peopling the Palaces 2024, an eight-day arts festival curated by Lois Weaver with Queen Mary University of London and Air Supply. She is a facilitator with Almeida Theatre and Coram Shakespeare, and an Embedded Evaluator with Half Moon Theatre. She will be performing in Walking Each Other Home with Stacy Makishi at the Southbank Centre. She loves Burt Bacharach, tarot, MGM musicals, and ghost stories. Originally from Toronto, she lives and works in East London.

Hamish Hutchison-Poyntz is a theatre practitioner, writer and reviewer, and aspiring director/producer. He recently completed his MA in Theatre and Performance at Queen Mary, University of London, specializing in the use of games and participatory theatre to respond to the climate crisis. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, he now lives in London’s East End. Besides theatre, he loves games, spooky audiodramas, and good cats (which is to say, all cats).