Perth Voice Interactive

IT took four years for Elise Wilson and Geordie Crawley to create their immersive play Logue Lake, which uses multi-channel radio, a cutting-edge set and simultaneous dialogue.

The setting is a familiar trope – four friends spend a weekend in a remote cabin in the woods when things start to go awry and a mystery unfolds.

But the play has a unique format – audience members are given radios and can change the channel to hear different characters talking on-stage.

People can choose to follow certain conversations, giving them a unique slant on the action.

However, all the key scenes take place when the cast are together, so there’s no confusion about where the plot is going.

Logue Lake director Elise Wilson says the radio system was a major technical challenge.

“There’s so much at play: fading mics each time a character enters a new scene (there are 106 scenes), creating environmental ambiance, recording internal monologues, scoring individual soundtracks on each channel (3.5 hours of original music), and creating the QLab file which requires actors to time all cues accurately each night,” Wilson says.

“Each radio channel is the point of view of one character and scenes happen simultaneously.

“So audiences not only choose which scenes to hear but also through which character’s perspective.”

The immersive quality of the play is enhanced by the unique 360-degree set design, which lets the audience walk around the stage and follow actors as they move through the cabin.

Some views are partially obscured, making the audience feel like voyeurs as they peek through a window and earwig a conversation.

“We didn’t perform on a set until our last development in late 2022, which was when we were able to test sightlines and find the perfect balance of obscuring audience view enough to encourage movement around the cabin, but not too much so there are still opportunities to see one scene in the foreground with another in the background,” Wilson says.

“It’s a show made for curious audience members who want to have a level of participation, and play a kind of investigative game with us.”

A former WAAPA student, Wilson has a background in theatre-making and has tried her hand at directing (Do I Look Like I Care, Talkback) writing, acting and improvising.

Logue Lake was written by the award-winning Geordie Crawley (Hive Mind, Girl in the Wood) who co-founded the independent theatre company Rorschach Beast. Although the two have worked together on local productions, this is their first official collaboration.

Wilson says they took inspiration from the Perth theatre company The Last Great Hunt, which use innovative tech in their productions: “I was also inspired by Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, which I’d performed in the year before and which has simultaneous dialogue, and I suggested to Geordie that we should have three plot lines that run simultaneously on different channels and intersect.”

All this interactive tech is great, but without a good storyline an audience will soon lose interest. So what’s Logue Lake all about?

“We’ve been intentionally tight-lipped about the plot because we don’t want to take away the discovery for the audience working out what’s happening,” Wilson says.

“There’s an element of mystery, so without giving it away, I’ll just say that four friends are having a weekend getaway at a cabin in the woods. 

“Each of their paths are interrupted when a seemingly lost hiker knocks on the door…”

Logue Lake is at the Studio Underground (State Theatre Centre) in Northbridge until Sunday March 3 as part of The Perth Festival. Tix at perthfestival.com.au.

by STEPHEN POLLOCK