Adult Children is a virtual theatre experience that invites us to interrogate the idea of social distance. Audiences enter an installation of red theatre seats. They put on headsets and find themselves in an empty theatre, entirely alone.
Staged in a scanned replica of the Donmar Warehouse Theatre, Adult Children is a unique form of 360 theatre that explores the psychogeography of solitude, probes the nuances of social responsibility and evokes the feelings of loss that characterise the Covid era for us all.
”engrossing stuff … melancholic and insightful.”
“an astonishingly vivid 3D recreation of the Donmar auditorium … characters and objects – trees, a car, a bench, a roll of toilet paper – materialise out of thin air then disappear just as quickly. The visual aesthetic is akin to watching technical drawing come to life, at once recognisable and abstract.”
“Adult Children is technically astonishing and emotionally accurate”
A woman walks. The stage transforms into streets and as she walks we learn that she is finding the relentlessness of her own company overwhelming. She repeatedly rings her friend, an NHS worker on maternity leave. Cooped up indoors with two kids, the best friend longs for the very solitude the first woman seeks to escape. Neither can fully imagine the other’s lockdown life and when one discovers the other has broken Covid rules to go on a date, a new distance creeps into their friendship. The woman feels her friend’s judgement, but her loneliness is so great she cannot resist driving to see her mother and seeking intimacy from a lover. A silent chorus of neighbours, dog walkers and commuters act as witness to the woman’s transgressions and the uncomfortable ethical dilemmas she faces in navigating lockdown alone.
“A beautiful depiction of community, family and especially isolation, a technically dazzling snapshot of life as lived over the past two years.”
Adult Children is produced by Donmar Warehouse, in association with English Touring Theatre, ScanLAB Projects and Trial and Error Studio