As anyone who works in the creative industries knows, the pandemic has been a terrible time for people working in theatre in particular. So it’s been a real pleasure to return to work on the last piece of live drama I helped to conceive and write - A Moment of Madness – and be part of the team that has worked out how to re-engineer what was always a rather complex piece of immersive theatre/gameplay and deliver it instead as a safe online experience.
In a brand new format for 2021, audiences take part online in teams of 2-4, taking active roles as MI5 agents from the comfort of their own homes. The show opened in May as part of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival, and has also had a run in association with Oxford’s zoom theatre pioneers Creation Theatre.
The new format involves actors having to improvise within Zoom meetings and lead online briefing sessions and presentations, whilst audiences follow weblinks, ‘hack’ Dropbox folders, take instructions and have conversations with characters on their phones and ultimately make crucial decisions about what will happen to the central protagonist, Michael Makerson MP.
It’s an intense but fun mix of escape room gameplay and online theatre. It’s also a somewhat prescient story about how a minister’s private life can collide with his public role and influence government policy. We came up with this story of Michael Makerson MP several years ago and yet here we are with Hancock, Johnson et al doing their best to turn our drama into real life!
For the low down on how AMOM actually works and to get a sense of the complexity of the production, here’s a video of Katie Day and John Sear, the other two co-creators explaining the work step by step: