Notes from a small island
Dear Esther Live brings The Chinese Room’s Hebridean adventure to UK concert halls
Dear Esther Live brings the Hebridean trip to concert halls
The Chinese Room’s award-winning adventure Dear Esther made its stage debut at London’s Barbican last year. The studio’s creative director Dan Pinchbeck played the game alongside a live narrator, with an orchestra performing Jessica Curry’s hauntingly beautiful soundtrack. Now, it’s going on the road. Here, Curry explains the process behind bringing this unique interactive performance to UK theatre audiences. Where did the idea for a live performance of Dear Esther originate? Jessica Curry: I went to this amazing British Film Institute event called Film, Archive and Music Lab, where they brought together international composers and producers. They took us to the Barbican to meet Chris Sharp, their contemporary music programmer. I got in touch with him after the week was up and said, “I’ve got a bit of a crazy idea. How would you feel about putting on a show with Dear Esther being played live, with a live actor narrating and live musicians?” He didn’t play games, but he said, “This sounds amazing – it’s what the Barbican is here for, to try new things, to experiment.” It turned out to be really technically complex. We had to do a new build of the game, with all the cues for the conductor and for the actor. But they were very supportive – and they were delighted afterwards because something like 64 per cent of the audience had never been to the Barbican before. A lot of people came up to me and said, “I’ve actually never been in a classical concert hall before”. For me, that was so exciting. What sort of technical complexities? Well, we obviously cut out the music and the narrator. We left ambient sound in, so the wind and footsteps were still there. But introducing these triggers turned out to be quite complicated, and we had different feeds of the game: the conductor has his own screen, so it would say ‘conductor cue one’ when Dan was playing the game, and he’d walk over a certain point, and then he would know to cue the musicians. Then we had to have a separate output with separate cues for the actor, saying ‘actor cue four’ for example, so he knew when to go as well. There was a lot going on for the performers on the night. The player’s route through the game isn’t necessarily identical each time. What challenges does that present for a live playthrough? Well, it was great having Dan play the game for the initial two runs of the show, because he obviously knows the game so well – he can take a different path, but he knows exactly where the trigger points are and that he’ll get to them eventually. To us, that was one of the most exciting things, and this is where, for me, it differed so hugely from the traditional model of scoring a film. This is going to be subtly different at every venue, and that interactivity is the exciting thing about this show.
“We had to do a new build of the game, with all the cues for the conductor and the actor”
Have you made a conscious decision to tr y to play it a specific way each time? No, I think it would feel too stagey for us. What Dan found was that he was responding to the musical conductor and his interpretations of the pieces, and the way the musicians played. That was really unexpected, and something we hadn’t planned, because we’d only had one rehearsal with the live musicians. And then on the night Dan said he was really inspired by the way they played. He knows the original soundtrack so well, but it’s five years later and the players have changed and they haven’t played the music for a long time, and they brought something very different to the music. And you could see that James Morgan, the conductor, was watching the big projection of the game and that he was responding in turn to the way Dan was playing. Dan would do a really lyrical sweep, and James was holding the musicians, just letting it pause for longer to get that shot. It must be unusual to experience your work being performed in that context. How does it differ from your memories of composing the music? For me, there’s nothing like live music. But yes, it was eight or nine years ago now, because I composed it for the original mod. So it had a life as a sampled piece of music before we could afford to get the string quartet and the musicians to re-record it for the commercial version of
Dear Esther. And we didn’t know whether it would stand the test of time, whether the game would look dated. But we were really pleased at how strong it still is as an experience. And Rob Briscoe’s visuals are so beautiful. I can’t wait for the tour – at the London Games Festival, I found a place where I could turn and see some of the audience watching the experience, and people were rapt. And it doesn’t get much better than that, to see these people who are completely in the moment watching something that you created.