Immersive production Saint Jude: a hotline to the unconscious

The light on the console turns orange. Soundwaves flicker on the screen and a robotic voice stutters into my ear.

“Do you have any phobias?” it asks.

I hesitate, unsure whether to try to sound genuine or original. “Spiders?” I venture.

“Spiders,” it replies. “Very original.”

Ten minutes into my first shift as a volunteer for Saint Jude, a mysterious organisation that claims to be able to let you converse with coma patients, and the AI is already mocking me. This is no ordinary video game dialogue. Or theatre script, for that matter. At the heart of Swamp Motel’s latest immersive production is a fine line between the real and the virtual, combining the narrative, in-person intrigue of a play with the freedom of a game, all underpinned by technology that tailors the dialogue to whatever you decide to say.

Venue closures during lockdown saw theatre and gaming collide as companies turned their attention to productions that could be staged via Zoom (no mean feat on a medium that many associate with work calls). Swamp Motel was no exception: its Plymouth Point, staged entirely online in 2020, saw participants join a virtual neighbourhood watch meeting on the trail of a missing woman, tracing clues across websites and social media.

Saint Jude returns audiences to a physical set, in this case a maze of identikit corridors in a London office building serving as the headquarters for the fictitious organisation. Led to my cubicle and introduced to the Echosump — a gloriously retro terminal on the desk that facilitates conversation with the unconscious — I find myself suddenly alone with my patient. Headphones muffle my surroundings, the desk lamps are low, and the translucent glass gives only a glimpse of the other participants in the room as I cautiously begin speaking into the microphone.

Enter the AI. Co-creator Ollie Jones calls it an “intense dialogue of infinite possibilities”, or, more concisely, an “interactive audio performance”. As you begin to interact, the technology by Oxford-based company Charisma listens to your responses and chooses from a range of prewritten dialogue in order to advance the conversation in the most natural way. In the case of the spiders, I spoke predictably enough that the show’s writers had a perfect answer already written. The more unpredictable you get, the less precise the response will be — but it will always try to keep the ball rolling.

The effect ranges from uncanny, when you hit on something that the prompt intended, to rather jarring when it mishears or fails to anticipate your reaction. “People will pick things up in the proposition you didn’t think they would,” says Jones. “You have to think about every phrase and sentence.” Not only does the technology need to account for the different ways a player phrases their response, but also the different overarching choices they make as they uncover the secrets of Saint Jude. Thousands and thousands of lines of dialogue have been written as a result, only a fraction of which the player will ever hear.

To say much more about the plot would be to incur ruinous spoilers, but, suffice to say, all is not as it seems (Jude is the patron saint of lost causes, after all). Rest assured: you won’t be chained to your desk the whole time and your experience will not entirely match up with the experiences of those around you.

It is a tense, atmospheric ride that cleverly occupies a genre entirely of its own making. And while it can be hit and miss in registering the more nuanced or unusual responses you offer, the implications of Charisma for games and immersive theatre are huge. Later this year, the technology will feature in The Kraken Wakes, a game adaptation of the John Wyndham novel in which your free dialogue will have a direct impact on the way characters behave. Could this spell the end of Mass Effect-style multiple choice dialogue options?

In the case of Saint Jude, it has allowed Swamp Motel not only to tweak the production right up until the first performance — rewriting dialogue, accounting for new audience interactions — but, like a game being updated after release, to continue to make changes throughout the run. The future of theatre has arrived — start preparing your lines.

‘Saint Jude’ is at 100 Petty France, London, to March 12, swampmotel.co.uk