The future of interactive theatre

In Destination Mars ,a theatre audience gets to boldly go where no audience has gone before, Bill Hickman writes.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to go on a mission to Mars, a new interactive experience will take you there. Beneath a giant dome screen of panoramic animated visuals, you’ll staff the control room of an international space station on Mars, working with a team to complete tasks and protect their crew from peril.

Destination Mars is the latest project from Hackman, a company headed by best mates Kip Chapman and Brad Knewstubb, creators of the award-winning interactive theatre show Apollo 13: Mission Control.

The Destination Mars experience was equal parts animated film, sci-fi story, live theatre and video game, Chapman said.

‘‘It’s like a Marvel movie which you as an audience have woken up within and, if you want to, you can talk to the lead actors,’’ Chapman said.

An award-winning actor and director, Chapman has appeared in television and film productions such as Hope and Wire, The Cult, Aftershock, Shortland Street, Interrogation and Serial Killers. He’s also won Chapman Tripp theatre awards for his work in The little dog that laughed and Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Chapman said the new production, being staged at Te Papa, allowed audience input to alter the experience in real time. The goal was to make people feel like they were the heroes of the story.

‘‘There’s a different outcome every time we do it based on how the audience engage,’’ Chapman said.

Chapman and Knewstubb met in their 20s while studying in Auckland. The pair bonded over the

challenges of road tripping to Cape Reinga powered by little more than a dozen cans of Coca-Cola.

‘‘Not very healthy but we’ve been best friends, and done a bunch of road trips, ever since,’’ Chapman said.

He didn’t initially share Knewstubb’s obsession with space until a six-month ‘‘holy grail of road trips’’ which led the pair across 40 American states over six months, culminating with a space shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral Florida.

‘‘Over the 12 years since then I have learned so much about space. I was into stories of survival, escape and bravery that now I see in what we’re doing as well. [Destination Mars] is like an escape room in

that sense,’’ Chapman said.

While he studied drama, Knewstubb studied industrial design and 20 years down the track the two bring their contrasting skills together.

‘‘For me as an actor, writer and director I’m trying to help the audience immerse themselves as much as possible in the world we’ve created, and Brad has been able to develop the technology platform that makes the show work,’’ Chapman said.

Essential to the development of Destination Mars was the adaptation of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine to incorporate the audience’s responses directly into the outcome of the experience. The

software was at the heart of multiplayer online games such as Fortnite, Street Fighter 5 and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

Knewstubb said that much like the original space missions, interactive elements in Apollo 13: Mission Control relied on technology more readily found in the 60s and 70s combined with a little No 8 wire ingenuity.

‘‘Apollo 13 used an old analogue TV network, dial phones, video feeds and static projections. We would take a box of Double Browns into the Kitchen Studio on Vivian St and they would give us bits of MDF so we could build the consoles,’’ Knewstubb said.

The gaming software opened up Destination Mars to a world of

interaction never seen before in a live setting. ‘‘It gets used in TV and film production, but as far as I know no one has used a game engine like this in live performance,’’ Knewstubb said.

It meant that the audience had more opportunities to interact and those interactions were more integral to the story.

‘‘The audience member has their own personal interaction with the tablet but also certain things can only be achieved as a culmination of those interactions. The audience has the ability to affect the show without breaking the show, and that’s pretty incredible,’’ Knewstubb said.

It’s been almost three years since the two started brainstorming the ideas that would become Destination Mars. Knewstubb is clearly excited by the experience they have created but also by the power and flexibility the developments have added to the format.

‘‘What we’re aiming at is to take the technology we’re creating here and to apply it to other experiences. My dream scenario would be to build production design and technology for other people to start using it once we prove that it works,’’ he said.

Destination Mars opens on December 11 in Te Papa as a part of the Wellington Festival of the Arts. Tickets: festival.nz/events/all/ destination-mars/