With emotions running high, weddings are always hectic occasions – but some, like the one depicted in upcoming immersive production I Do, are more tense than others when you throw family secrets, old flames and pregnancy tests into the mix. Created by immersive theatre specialists Dante or Die, I Do is set in the immediate run-up to a wedding. It will take place in a series of rooms at the luxury boutique hotel Malmaison near the Barbican Centre, as part of the arts complex’s Scene Change season of off-site work.
I Do was originally created by Dante or Die’s Daphna Attias and Terry O’Donovan 13 years ago. They were at a point in their lives where everyone was getting married and, says Attias, “We had all these conversations about why people would still get married or choose not to get married”. They wanted to create a show that looked at the subject from a variety of generations and different perspectives. “That’s why the show has a cast of eight to 80-year-olds,” she says.
Audiences for I Do are divided into groups of 12 and taken from room to room by an usher. The nature of the show means that while everyone experiences the same six scenes, they will experience them in a different order, piecing together the story as they go like a puzzle. As family secrets begin to unravel, every whispered secret, stolen glance and subtle touch could be a clue. In one room, a best man’s speech is falling apart; in another, the bride tries to shake her nerves. Love and fear stalk the hotel’s hallways.
From a structural perspective, this was a complicated show to put together. Making it was “a little like planning a wedding”, Attias says. The hotel room setting is at once intimate and voyeuristic, with some audiences from its previous run emboldened to nose around the room and peek inside wedding gifts, so “there was no detail that we could leave unsupervised”.
This is the company’s 20th anniversary. Since 2006 Dante or Die has specialised in making theatre in unconventional spaces from leisure centres to storage units, as well as digital pieces designed to be experienced on your phone. The team has created innovative installations like the socially distanced Skin Hunger, created during the pandemic, and are always finding new ways to experiment with form. I Do was the first piece the company worked on with a writer, the playwright Chloë Moss, who is now reworking the piece to reflect how things have changed in the intervening years. (“There was no Tinder back then.”)
After making work for 20 years, the company is inevitably in a reflective mode. “We really found something about ourselves and our practice when we made I Do,” Attias says. Looking back, she marvels at how they were able to pull off such a complex show given where they were in their lives at the time – with some of their team raising young children who are now old enough to assist on the show. “We were young, and ambitious,” she says. For her, returning to the show is a bit like coming home. “There’s a familiar smell to it, an energy to it.”
I Do runs from January 20 to February 8 at Malmaison Hotel.
barbican.org.uk
