Draw Me Close: new virtual reality play opens at the Young Vic

Virtual reality (VR) lends itself easily to specific art forms, such as gaming, or documentaries. Put on a headset and you might be fighting off giant spider creatures or watching a blue whale swim past you in the ocean.

And soon, you could be wearing a VR headset in the theatre. Draw Me Close, a co-production between the National Theatre (NT) and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), is a VR play set to open for previews at the Young Vic Theatre on 21 January.

Draw Me Close takes the genre of immersive theatre and turns it on its head. Written by respected Canadian writer and director Jordan Tannahill, the story takes you back into his memories of being a child, living at home with his mother, as the adult Jordan reckons with his mother’s recent breast cancer diagnosis.

What’s different about Draw Me Close is that as the audience member you are taken into the story, re-living Jordan's memories through an HTC Vive headset, and interacting with his mother, played by actor Tamzin Griffin, as part of the piece.

It's theatre, but unlike anything you will have experienced before.

How Draw Me Close started

The National Theatre and the National Film Board of Canada decided to collaborate on a lab with four theatre-makers, two from the UK and two from Canada, to explore how emerging technologies such as VR could play a role in theatre. This came after David Oppneheim, a producer for NFB, and Toby Coffey, head of digital development at NT, sat next to one another at Sheffield’s Doc:Fest and got talking.

The writer of Draw Me Close, Tannahill, was one of the Canadian theatre-makers, but he says he was initially sceptical of VR’s capabilities.

“I was underwhelmed by a lot of what I was seeing,” he tells the Standard. “It seemed like a lot of the pieces were predicated on the spectacle of the tech itself and the spectacle of being there – plunking oneself in the Jungle, the Calais refugee camp, or plunking you down underwater. It felt a little facile I suppose.”

Slowly though, the medium began to grow on Tannahill, and he began to explore the things that were unique to VR. One element he was attracted to was the way VR allowed you to replicate a dreamscape or an experience of being in a memory.

“Something that feels so tangible and present in one moment and then you turn and all of a sudden it’s undrawn and evaporates and the environment around you has shape-shifted and you’re in an entirely different room together. That was something I wanted to seize upon,” he explains.

Drawing on his own memories was key to creating Draw Me Close because one of the stipulations of the project was that it needed to be a work of creative non-fiction. The symbolism of drawing in the production comes from a few different forms: Tannahill’s mother is an amateur artist, you experience drawing with her, and the VR setting is like a graphic novel that is drawn and un-drawn around you. As well, it also relates to how people are drawn together in a relationship.

“The idea that I could tell the story of our relationship in almost an immersive graphic novel or graphic memoir felt really exciting to me, so that’s how the piece began to germinate," says Tannahill.

Using VR in the theatre

It’s interesting experiencing someone else’s personal feelings in Draw Me Close and studies have shown that VR can make people more compassionate.

“There is something about virtual experience that I would say creates a certain relationship and a certain aesthetic relationship that communicates a passage of time in a way that feels very moving and evocative,” says Tannahill.

When early iterations of Draw Me Close were shown the Tribeca and Venice Film Festivals, they certainly garnered strong reactions. Some people cried afterwards, some people wanted to talk about what they had experienced; some wanted to sit and think about it without discussing it.

“The reactions we saw were quite profound in terms of people’s reactions to the piece as a whole and in terms of the connections people were able to make in six minutes,” explains Oppenheim.

In particular, this has an impact on how organisations should approach showing work of this kind.

“The big question is because that form allows more of a stronger emotional hit, there’s a sense of responsibility that comes with that,” says Coffey. “The creator of the work needs to keep that in mind and you, as the organisation, or the host, need to start learning that with audiences.”

It’s all about experimentation

Given that the technology itself is still very much in its early stages, creating Draw Me Close as a performance has been a learning curve for everyone involved.

For instance, the mum character wears a motion capture suit fitted with 12 sensors, to capture her movements and translate them into the VR aspects. It is similar to those used in film by characters including Golum, but it’s very different using this kind of tech in a film where it can be edited in post-production, to using it in a live performance.

Glitches could cause weird arm movements or head contortions in an almost horrifying way. “It was very Linda Blair in The Exorcist,” says Tannahill.

As well, the narration during the performance was initially coming in through headphones, but this was changed to bone-conducting earphones, to create a more situational sound.

“There’s lots of these different types of technologies and it’s a process of finding which ones work best technically but also artistically in relation to the particular piece we’re doing,” explains Coffey.

As the technology gets better, it should allow more freedom in performance, as audience members don’t notice the glitches or issues and become fully immersed in the production.

“Our collective goal as a team is that the story isn’t the technology,” explains Oppenheim. “The technology disappears and what you’re experiencing is a story, an emotional story.”

When it comes to using VR again, Tannahill says he isn’t sure. “The application of VR in this play is so specific that I can’t imagine making something like this again. But, what I would say is I have an immense appreciation for VR as a discreet medium unto itself.

“It’s definitely not film, not theatre, it’s nothing other than what it really is and eventually it will find its great authors and visionaries, people who will be making great works of art in VR,” he adds.

There is certainly a place for VR at NT. Coffey says the potential for storytelling is huge with these immersive technologies. “I’m a big believer in that a lot of big disciplines like film, gaming, and theatre are increasingly blurred genres now. And if we want to be part of that ecosystem then we need to be working with it now.”

Draw Me Close will take place at the Young Vic Theatre from 21 January to 2 February. Tickets are on sale now.