I’ve visited the inner-city Melbourne suburb of Footscray many times but last week I saw it in an entirely different light: as a nightmarish bizarro world, sort of real and sort of not. The concept of using art to reinvigorate disused spaces is far from novel, but it’s been taken to compelling heights in The Door in Question, an intense – and at times deeply unsettling – 90-minute extended reality, or XR, production that blends immersive theatre, escape rooms, virtual reality and mixed reality (overlaying the real world with digital elements).
Described by creator and director Troy Rainbow as “an immersive journey into psychosis”, The Door in Question was partly inspired by his own experience of psychosis as well as the experiences of his mother, who had schizophrenia.
The 37-year-old artist used letters she wrote to him – reflecting “her type of thinking, and the type of thinking I fell into” – to inform the core challenge of “adapting delusional belief systems into narrative form”. The story centres around four delusional characters, each of which believe a man named Anton was killed in a different way.
The word “immersive” is bandied around a lot these days, but The Door in Question really is immersive, creating an enveloping experience that engages all the senses – including touch and smell.
The Door in Question takes place in and around Metro West shopping centre in Footscray, which has been largely abandoned by retailers. Photograph: Lauren Marr
It begins in a small room in Metro West shopping centre – a largely unused complex with, as Rainbow puts it, “a cachet of lost dreams feel about it”. After a brief guided meditation, I’m fitted with a VR headset, and emerge from the room to walk around the virtually altered centre, encountering peculiar objects that weren’t there before. Some I’ll see again later on, in physical rather than virtual reality – which blurs the actual and the unreal, and triggers a strange kind of deja vu.
Trading my headset for a pair of headphones, I head on to the street, where a mysterious woman tells me stories about various locations around me while directing me around the block and into another building.
Here I move through a series of surreal-looking rooms filled with old and decaying elements. There’s a lab-like environment with a dentist’s chair; a security room in which I have a conversation with myself via AI that imitates my voice; a grotty kitchen filled with broken and oddly placed things; and a creepy kids room, with plush snakes on the bed and a homemade board game.
The participant passes through a number of surreal-looking rooms as part of the experience. Photograph: Lauren Marr
Throughout the experience, voices sprout up from unexpected places around me, achieved in part through directional speakers – “so it actually sounds like a voice in your head”, says Rainbow. These voices deliver bizarre and sometimes hysterical rants. A man talks about our soul becoming data and dissolving; a child speaks of divine miracles. As I move through these environments, I encounter strange pictures and written material – religious texts, cryptic notes scrawled on walls, typed documents in folders. It feels as if I’m inside a scary movie or video game.
The Door in Question (which premiered in 2021, and has experienced several iterations before this current one) is powerful partly because of its intimate nature. Throughout the experience, the participant is alone – with the exception of an actor who follows them up the street, ensuring they head in the right direction – and alone with the thoughts in their head (plus all those crazy ones bouncing off the walls). The intimacy of the experience, coupled with the fact that each participant co-authors it, makes it feel very personal.
All this requires a very different approach to storytelling from mediums with ringfenced fields of representation, such as film and traditional theatre. Beyond the obvious difference of interactivity, this kind of storytelling involves using space to reveal information, and establishing an interplay between narrative and location.
Creator Troy Rainbow drew from the letters and personal writings of his mother, who had schizophrenia. Photograph: Lauren Marr
Technology is crucial to pulling this off, and Rainbow says “I work with the mindset that technology isn’t the facilitator of the idea – it’s a co-creator”.
Finding the right real-world locations is also key, and using abandoned and dilapidated spaces is something Rainbow is passionate about: “Why work against that to create something? Why not allow that to inform the experience?” he says. “It’d be cool if there were more artistic experiences embedded in dormant spaces.”