Darkfield - Seance, Flight, Arcade

David Rosenberg and Glen Neath (Darkfield)

Darkfield Events

HOME, Manchester (Seance); Aviva Studios, Manchester (Flight); Lowry, Salford (Arcade)

September 10-21, 2025

Each immersive show is staged in a shipping container and lasts 20-25 mins

Is anybody there? Darkfeld's Seance immersive event in a shipping container near HOME, Manchester. Pic: Sean Pollock

A friend and colleague of mine (an esteemed director and performer) once bemoaned the misuse, overuse and general exaggeration of the term "immersive theatre". It's so often aspirational - where the creators would like you to feel immersed and experience the same world as the characters, but whether or not you actually do is perhaps hit and miss, depending on the individual.

Darkfield is different. Entering a pitch-black shipping container and leaving all belongings at the door (depending on their relevance to the actual experience), you are entering into the unknown. In the Arcade container you actually leave your sense of self at the door, along with your things and become Milk, a character in a post-apocalyptic world, in which each arcade game choice can mean life or death... for somebody. In Flight you have your belongings stored in the overhead locker or under the seat in front of you. And in Seance, all you enter with is your soul. Whether it stays with you until you get out is another matter...

The action takes place over a pair of headphones, but also sound, sensation and movement all around you. At one point you might smell burning. Did you? Or was it just the suggestion? I still don't know. 

The feeling of altering proximity is a large part of the action, created by voice, clever sound-engineering and sensation. But which parts are affected by live actors or by automation? We can guess, but we will never know.

While Seance feels so real that I am told it has had its fair share of religious detractors, Arcade makes the unreal real, and the experience of being a video game character garners the empathy and fear of the audience-member/participant and makes her real.

My favourite was Flight, conjuring memories of plane-based screen stories - Lost, Manifest and a hundred more. It reminds you that you're simultaneously in two states: one in a shipping container, with another version of you on the plane. If Schrodinger's cat is alive and dead in equal measure until we open the box, think about that from the perspective of the cat... So which version of you will emerge and in what state? It's so good, you genuinely don't always know.

It's a kind of high-octane meditative experience, to lose the ability to think about anything else but the object of dramatic focus with which you are presented. And here's the thing about immersion; it exists in the mind. As my friend the director said, "the scenery is always better on the radio". And there it is, you can't spook someone more than they can spook themselves in the depths of their own imagination.

So leave your belongings at the door, but take your demons with you.

More info and tickets here