Toward a New Understanding of Immersive Theatre After Three Days in Malta

Day One: Popeye Village

I asked Popeye the sailor man about the theatre scene in Malta, the island nation in the Mediterranean that I was visiting for a few days. Sitting on a porch in front of the village firehouse and holding his corn cob pipe, Popeye told me with gritted teeth—because that’s how Popeye talks—that he is from Poland and doesn’t know anything about the theatre in Malta because he has only been working for a year at Popeye Village; I should talk to Bluto. Black-bearded Bluto, looking ornery sitting on a bench on Main Square, told me he is from Italy and has been working at Popeye Village for nine years, but he didn’t know anything about theatre in Malta. He called over Wimpy, who was holding an oversized burger.

“I love the theatre in Malta,” said Wimpy, whose real name is Mario Mirkovikj. He’s from Macedonia and has been working at Popeye Village for seven years; “I’ve played all the characters.”

In 1979, director Robert Altman created Sweethaven, a town of wooden buildings constructed on the coast of Anchor Bay in the Maltese islands, for his movie Popeye, starring Robin Williams. Rather than scrap the elaborate film set at the end of the shooting, Sweethaven was renamed Popeye Village and turned into a theme park.

Mirkovikj got his job at Popeye Village the year he came to Malta to study theatre at the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology.

“There are a lot of small theatres here in Malta,” he said. “There were ten different shows happening in a single week, some of it from my school.” There are also several well-known venues. Teatru Manoel bills itself as one of the oldest working theatres in Europe, dating back to 1732. The Mediterranean Conference Center, which was built in the sixteenth century as a hospital, now presents companies from around the world, including Cirque du Soleil and the Teatro alla Scala of Milan, in Republic Hall, a 1,400-seat theatre built with modern lighting and sound systems in what was once the hospital’s main courtyard.

“We have a loyal audience,” Mirkovikj said. If his castmates at Popeye Village don’t know about the theatre scene in the country, he said, it’s because they are not really theatre people; “they’re entertainers.”

Just then, back to being Wimpy, he was called to join the dozen other characters dressed in colorful comic strip finery. Popeye Village was closing for the day, and its residents started solemnly saluting the lowering of a flag that looked like a comic strip version of the American one. Then they broke into a dance. Their synchronized, signature move: rubbing their stomach and their head at the same time.

Day Two: 1881

The next night, I was standing in a dark garden with castle-like walls, wearing a mask and a dark red, hooded robe, along with about a dozen other “guests” who had been snuck into this end-of-the-world masquerade party. A grim-faced butler, a maid, and a doorkeeper somberly explained, in verse, the terrible fate that had befallen the world in 1881, the year to which we had been transported: There had been a great war, followed by a “laughing plague,” in which people’s tongues turned black and then they died laughing. This is why they checked our tongues, one by one, to make sure we weren’t infected yet. Now, they explained the five rules of the house.

Rule number two:

Speak not unless spoken to — hush your voice,

This is their house, their rules, their choice.

They also told us about the five people we would meet, all members of the same family, but each with a different approach to life… and to death.

I had been invited for a quick trip to Malta by Teatru Malta, the national theatre company—part of the established theatre scene that Wimpy had discussed—to review 1881,their cutting-edge work of immersive theatre.

From around 2014 until the pandemic lockdown, I was, well, immersed in reviewing immersive theatre, or at least the constant barrage of shows that were calling themselves immersive. Just to get a handle on it all, I came up with a practical definition of the genre (occasionally updated), which I continued to apply once immersive shows re-emerged with the return of in-person theatre. There has been far less of it in New York since the pandemic. Elsewhere, apparently, the pace hadn’t slowed.

Sean Buhagiar, the artistic director of Teatru Malta, notes the genre’s palpable presence throughout Europe, even if “the form hasn’t reached Broadway-style mainstream status in most European markets.” In Malta, Buhagiar said, “we came late to the party, but we also tried to do it differently. I personally find Malta is a great space to experiment with art.”

It was surely easy to find a great space for 1881 in a country with still-standing temples that date back five thousand years and everyday streets, narrow and dramatically lit, that look more influenced by the island’s ancient Arabic rule and post-medieval reign by the Knights of the Order of St. John than by its 150 years as a British colony before the nation gained independence in 1964. The play took place in Villa Bologna, an eighteenth century landmark estate in the village of Attard. After signing a lengthy disclaimer, donning our costumes, and getting our introduction and instructions, we were led in a procession along the stone wall to a large, elegant townhouse full of twisting staircases, hidden rooms, ornate balustrades.

From a balcony, I looked down on a backyard, attended by an ethereal-looking woman, and went down to take a closer look.

What she was tending turned out to be an altar.

“Are you afraid of dying?” she asked, and waited for my answer

I was taken aback. I thought we weren’t supposed to speak. “Sure,” I replied, feeling lame.

“Can I wash your feet?”

Was she serious? Did she expect me to take off my shoes and socks, or was this going to be a pantomime. Just in case it was the former, I said simply “No.”

She seemed to lose interest then.

This was Eve (portrayed by Sandie von Brockdorff), who the Doorkeeper had described as “a devout priestess.” Her approach to imminent death was to face it with penitence and prayer.

My next encounter, back upstairs, was with Mistress Mari (Silvana Malmone), Eve’s mother, a woman with voluptuous hair and a flowing gown, who beckoned me into her bedroom (given all the silk hangings, better to call it her boudoir). She patted the bed beside her, then showed me a large, old-fashioned key.

“Do you see this key?” she said with an odd smile. “What do you think it opens up.”

I shook my head.

She took out an ornate, carved wooden chest the size of a loaf of bread and asked me what I thought was inside.

Again, I felt dumb.

She opened it. Inside were sex toys and a book: the Kama Sutra. (I thought that smile might be lascivious.)

By this time, two more “guests” had been lured in. She asked us to use the toys to re-create the poses in the book. I exited quickly.

Mistress Mari was the head of the family and a hedonist; to her, life should be an orgy, even when it’s ending.

I had less uncomfortable interactions with two of the other characters. Rachel (Rebecca Camilieri) the scientist, Mari’s other daughter, spent time in a lab full of tubes and flasks and medical equipment—apparently looking for a cure. Mari’s stepson Will (Chris Scicluna), a committed death-seeker who frequently held a live snake, was a curiosity to me, not a menace. But then the fifth member of the household came storming by, screaming, his face full of fury. He handed me a rifle and brought me into a dark, cellar-like room. There, he had tied up a young woman, dressed in the hooded cloak of the “guests.” He asked me to help him bind her tighter. This suddenly felt like the Milgram experiment. No, I’m not going to help torture her. Again, I fled.

I realized too late that in each of these uncomfortable encounters the characters had been offering me a quest, or a task, that would drive the story forward.

Over the two-and-a-half hours that I was at the house, I witnessed many intense scenes: Another “guest” (evidently a plant) contracted the laughing plague, hysterical presumably unto death; Eve cut off all her hair and carried it in a bowl; there was much confrontation and running around.

I was impressed by how much the show adhered to the definition I had come up with for immersive theater. I had identified six elements that seemed to exist in the best of the immersive work I had seen, and 1881 fulfilled the first five:

. Did it…

1. …create a physical environment that differs from traditional theatre? Undeniably.
2. …double as an art installation and hands-on museum? Spectacularly.
3. … make individual audience members feel as if they have had a uniquely personal experience? The actors spoke to me directly, waiting for my response, and reacting to what I said or did (or didn’t do).
4. …feel like a social gathering? The characters sometimes put us together as a group; we were served hors d’oeuvres; there was a bartender serving drinks.
5. …stimulate all five senses? There was the food and drink, the usual (for immersive theatre) constant eerie soundscape and underscoring, vivid costumes; the production even offered an array of smells.
6. …have a story to tell, and give respect to storytelling? This is the element in which much immersive theatre stumbles. Many have little or no dialogue, relying on dance and acrobatics.

With 1881, however, I felt I was the one who stumbled. I didn’t truly grasp what was going on until I left the house and met some of the other theatregoers, who told me we were supposed to go on quests, perform tasks, and join teams. I had noticed slips of papers with little messages on them placed around the house, and at one point Mistress Mari gave me a medallion to wear, and then Will gave me one and took Mari’s. But this felt part of the atmosphere, not central to the story.

The actor who had been tying up the woman, Nicholas Jackman, came out onto the street then too. His character, he told me, was Albert, the survivor, charged with protecting the household. He did this by finding the evil cult leader who had infiltrated the house disguised as one of the guests and interrogating her. That was the woman (portrayed by Kiely Agri) who I thought he was about to torture.

I realized too late that in each of these uncomfortable encounters the characters had been offering me a quest, or a task, that would drive the story forward.

Sean Buhagiar elaborated in a later email exchange: 1881 was “a fusion of immersive theatre and interactive game design.” Indeed, one of its three co-creators is Gordon Calleja, a designer of board games and the founder of the University of Malta’s Institute of Digital Games.

Buhagiar, the director and co-creator of the show, explained its basic gameplay approach:

You are not just an observer. You are a participant, a character, a variable in the equation. Every choice you make has weight—your actions affect the story, the characters, and even other audience members. It’s not a promenade piece where we guide you from scene to scene. You are given partial agency to explore an unfolding narrative, where multiple storylines play out simultaneously, and quests lead you deeper into the world… Our goal was to strip theatre of its rigid conventions while preserving its ritualistic power.

Immersive theatre has evolved, in other words, to include gaming. The six elements I had so congratulated myself in extrapolating from immersive theatre in New York no longer seemed adequate to defining it. And I felt pretty inadequate, too. I wondered if I was no longer the right demographic, or even the right personality type, to appreciate it.

Immersive theatre, in various forms, has much older roots in European performance traditions.

Day Three: Karnival

I had come to Malta to see 1881, but I couldn’t leave without visiting Valletta, the capital city, with its historic limestone buildings lining narrow cobbled streets, including “Old Theatre Street” (as the wooden sign nailed to the stone corner building announced), where I took a tour of the eighteenth century Teatru Manoel and Republic Street, where I saw Caravaggio’s The Beheading of St John the Baptist inside the breathtakingly ornate sixteenth century St. John’s Co-Cathedral. But by far the most eye-opening sight occurred after I felt somebody grab me and push me aside. He was moving me out of the way to avoid colliding with a huge float. I had been looking up at the architecture, unaware that I was in the middle of Karnival ta’ Malta. This is an annual event that has been celebrated on Malta since the fifteenth century. One float after another, each obviously handcrafted, each on a theme, each accompanied by a troupe dressed in spectacular costumes, often paused for synchronized choreography. There was one for The Lion King.

“Are you sponsored by Disney?” I asked one of the members of the troupe.

“No, this is our own. But it’s the same story.”

The same “story.”

Karnival ta’ Malta struck me as more than just a parade. It struck me as immersive theatre. Site-specific, miles of handcrafted wares, a social gathering, certainly a personal experience for me.

In our later email exchange, without any prompting from me, Buhagiar said something that felt like confirmation: “Immersive theatre, in various forms, has much older roots in European performance traditions,” Buhagiar told me. “Think of medieval mystery plays that immersed audiences in religious narratives in the streets. One could argue that local traditions like Good Friday re-enactments, and even our carnival performances carry elements of immersive storytelling.”

Even Nicholas Jackman, the scarily convincing “survivor” in 1881, told me that one of his other “experiential work[s] outside of traditional theatre” was performing in Popeye Village!

Perhaps my definition of immersive theatre was always too narrow, and too complicated. Or perhaps the era has passed in which the phrase could describe a specific theatrical genre. Maybe Amber Lawson, who has been involved in immersive theatre productions in several continents over the past fifteen years, has the simplest and most basic definition of immersive theatre, which she explained in a panel on the topic at this year’s BroadwayCon. Immersive theatre, she says, offers theatregoers at least two things: play and choice.