# A Prismatic Eye on A Midsummer Night's Dream

- Year: 2019
- Category: Theatre
- Client: HKU
- Role: Co-concept, set, VR and 360 production, show tech
- Canonical version: https://diedetap.com/en/work/a-prismatic-eye/

**A performance in which Shakespeare has been rewritten into a reality show. Half the audience puts on a VR headset, the other half watches actors play the same scenes live, in a completely different tone.**

The brief was fixed: it had to be cross-media and it had to be about this play. The answer became Dreams & Desire, a reality series in which four finalists compete for a cruise and ten thousand euros, and in which the entanglements come almost one-to-one from A Midsummer Night's Dream. You're a guest at the live finale: in the VR headset you watch the polished broadcast in 360 film, on the floor actors play the same events in a bare white set. Even the smells run in sync - where the film smells, an actor sprays perfume. If you're not wearing a headset, the performance is exactly the gap between what you see on the screens beside the set and what happens on it.


## Two kinds of audience
On arrival the audience is split: one half gets a headset and a place in the middle of the broadcast, the other half stays studio audience and walks around freely. Wearing the headset makes you part of the show. You're inside the scene, and the room watches you while you watch the series.


## Same scene, different tone
The series in the headset is edited the way reality TV should be: dramatic music underneath, the close-up at the right moment, every emotion made just a bit bigger. On the floor, exactly the same thing happens, but without all that help. Bare, direct, sometimes just uncomfortably quiet. The two run in step, and still they're two different stories.


## What you feel instead of see
VR can do a lot, but it can't make wind. That's why the white set has the same layout as the interior in the headset, and the actors genuinely play the scenes around you. The bed you're sitting on really moves, something brushes past when someone walks by, and the perfume from the film hangs in the room too. The virtual world is made believable by people doing something real right next to you.


## You can't see everything
Three stages, two storylines that only converge in the second act, and everything runs simultaneously. So you choose where to stand, and with it what you miss. On the big screens you can follow the broadcast, but as long as you do, you're missing what's happening live.