Riptide's 'Intermission': The Healing Power Of Curated Experience
A Groundbreaking Theatrical Installation In Central Leeds
I slipped into theatreland by a side door when I ‘accidentally’ wrote a radio play, and submitted it to a nationwide competition. It didn’t win but it caught the fancy of a BBC radio drama producer and in due course the BBC commissioned it for Radio Four.
I was now, officially, a professional playwright and so I met actors, directors and many other people engaged in the various ancilliary trades that theatre generates, such as set design, lighting, marketing, front-of-house, venue management and eventually academic writing and criticism,
All this, undiploma-ed. All this without passing through the magic portal of drama school.
Do I regret it? Sometimes. The best playwrights, as a general rule, have spent time as actors and directors. But I also know at least two former English teachers who fell in to writing and directing plays when ‘running the drama club’ or ‘doing the Nativity’ was dumped on them. Such individuals can rack up more theatrical experience than those who follow more conventional routes.
Yet, just as children around the world gobble up story-book adventures set at upper-class British boarding schools, I too have a vision of what drama school would have looked like, had I attended one. And in my imagined curriculum — set in Dark Academia, naturally — there would have been space for earnest late-night conversations over mugs of cocoa, in which we thrashed out such meaningful questions as: “Yes, but what is theatre, and what is it for?”
Alex Palmer, the 31-year-old founder and artistic director of the immersive Riptide Theatre Company, based in Leeds, learnt his skills at Exeter University.
“The course in Exeter is known for traditional theatre,” he tells me. “So a lot of my cohort went on to Royal Welsh College and RADA and Central as actors. There was a big push for grounding and the more traditional side of things.
“But there was also, because it came out of Dartington Art College, a big site-specific flavour to the whole course.”
Dartington Art College, which met its demise in 2010, was roughly the Devon equivalent of our own much-missed Bretton Hall. Both began life as teacher-training establishments but developed broadbased arts curriculae which fostered original work and attempted to link students’ creativity with broader questions about society.
Something of Dartington’s ethos seems to have survived.
“Punchdrunk came from Exeter,” he says. “Shunt came from Exeter. It's known for making interesting companies who make work in unusual ways. And Riptide came from that.”
What he is claiming here is kinship with immersive theatre royalty. Shunt’s Millennium Year show The Ballad of Bobby Francois, inspired by a real-life episode of plane-crash cannibalism in the Andes, was considered groundbreaking in its day and had a significant impact on longstanding (2003-15) National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner.
What immersive theatre companies have in common is a preoccupation with physical space and how audience members move through it having unique experiences related to that environment.
Palmer went to work for Punchdrunk (“Hands down the best immersive theatre company in the world,” Time Out magazine) after graduating, and he also had a spell on the secretive and cultish You Me Bum Bum Train theatrical project.
But then, having been born in Oldham, Lancashire, and raised mostly in Huddersfield and Leeds, he had the urge to come back North.
“Being a Northern boy, it was important to me to make work that I was seeing in London and not happening in the North. And I actually do think there's a dearth of immersive work in the North. It's a shame for Northern audiences to have to travel to London to see it.
“So, the aim of Riptide was to set up a company that would offer extraordinary experiences to audiences and to offer something different in the theatrical landscape of Yorkshire.”
What did he learn from Punchdrunk?, I ask him. The response is vehement.
“So… none of our shows are masked, for example. In Punchdrunk, it doesn't really matter who you are. You're anonymous, you're a voyeur, you can come and go as you please. You can walk out and the show will still continue.
“I kind of hated that. I hated that I wasn't special as an audience member, and that's more of what a Riptide show is about. We know a lot about our audiences before they walk in, and depending on what you do changes your show. We try and infuse bespoke elements of your life into each of our shows.
“So a big trope of Riptide is the pre-show questionnaire. We find out a lot of information about you, from how you take your tea, to your thoughts on the world at the moment, your dreams and aspirations, your relationship to your family, significant others and their names, and their names may come into your shows.
“I saw a real need for the intimate one-on-one work, actually, and the way I think about it is, rather than packing 300 people into one experience, to make quite a shallow depth of experience, we're choosing to go for a small audience and go with a huge impact on each one of those people.”
I certainly found my own experience of Riptide’s unique brand to be impactful. In the spring of 2021, with the nation still social distancing, I signed up for Project Intimacy. The promise was that I would be digitally paired with a like-minded stranger and that over the course of two weeks we would be brought closer together via the anonymous exchange of first texts, then phone calls, culminating in a grand reveal. It wasn’t about dating — I elected not to know whether my partner would be male or female — but about reaching out emotionally to someone without pre-assumptions. And it was all based rigourously on peer-reviewed research into how people make friends.
The reality was that I was paired, and locked into progressive closeness, with an individual I disliked — a patronising intellectual from somewhere Down South. To this day I believe in the early stages he sent me a stock picture that falsified where he was living. (He wouldn’t be the first person who has lied to me and thought I didn’t notice.) Then there was a pivotal telephone exchange in which he enquired after my musical tastes. And when I replied thoughtfully, “the Late Romantics” — meaning to riff for a while on the wonders of Tchaikovsky — he assumed without really listening that I must be talking about the 1980s pop group Spandau Ballet.
Spandau Ballet? When there’s an entire back catalogue of pop and rock magnificence from the Beatles onwards to explore? I was insulted. I did my best to maintain my end of the project, but as far as my subconscious was concerned, he was already a dead man walking.
Various other irritations followed: The fuss he made about his lockdown baking (I’m wheat intolerant); his dislike of tradesmen; his assumption that any utterance that came out of a Northerner’s mouth must be stupid and racist…
Finally, a day or so before the end of the project, when I was racking my brains as to how to get rid of him, he mansplained to me about how the post-modernist theories that influenced his writing were “deeply moral”. At that point, I’d had enough and screamed down the phone that there was nothing “moral” about the crackpot theories that were destroying women’s rights and, anyway, Foucault had a basic misunderstanding of scientific method and its relationship with reality.
After that he refused to engage further with me. And the bleak conclusion I derived from our supposedly intimate exchange was that the divide between privileged academics with their luxury beliefs, and the rest of us, was impossible to bridge.
In retrospect I can see that we were all a little crazy during that third lockdown and that, although I shouldn’t have shouted, it was insensitive of him to boast about how well his publisher was looking after him during the pandemic. He knew I’d lost my father to Covid and then, shortly afterwards, been made redundant by my employer of more than 20 years. To hear him praising the very theories which in the spring of 2021 (before Forstater v. CGD Europe and Arts Council England v. Denise Fahmy), represented a real barrier to my return to the arts was the final straw. But still I felt terrible about it.
So much for Riptide’s famous questionnaire. But I didn’t blame Riptide for pairing me up with this idiot because I understood how it might have happened. We were both writers. We both espoused minimalism (in his case from a house favoured with sea views and a large living room furnished with luxuriant pot plants, sofas and glass tables and, in my case, from a small flat that remains, despite my best efforts, a stubborn mess); and we were both interested in Theory and how it impacts on society. I loathe post-modernism with every fibre of my being, but at least I’ve heard of it.
I don’t believe Riptide should have put a stronger trigger warning on Project Intimacy. Warning away potential participants such as myself — and, I suspect, the person I was partnered with — who might have an issue with, well, intimacy would have been as stupid as sticking a notice saying “This coffee is hot,” on a cup of hot coffee. But nevertheless the experience hurt. It was an emotionally dangerous enterprise. I took a risk and, in my case, it didn’t work out. Whether my opposite number shrugged me off as a mad Northern bitch or was scarred for life is a question that haunts me.
The emotional legacy of Project Intimacy was painful. Which means I approached Intermission, Riptide’s latest project, with caution. But hope triumphs over experience and, anyway, the show — if it could indeed be called that — was only going to last 80 minutes.
And this is how, a few weeks before Christmas, I found myself standing in the pouring rain outside a piss-smelling doorway in Leeds’ Merrion Street. This, for the uninitiated, is the place where the high-end retail glamour of Briggate and the Victorian Arcades gives way to the distinctly low-end shopping experience of the Merrion Centre.
Intermission was taking place in a disused office suite on the third floor. I keyed myself into the prosaic 1970s-style building and, after a 10-minute wait in a convincing faked Reception area, was led through a heavy curtain.
Here, I was divested politely of my boots, bag and phone. Soothing ambient sounds coiled through the air.
Intermission’s own publicity had already given me some indication of what to expect: A smattering of therapy, some life coaching, meditation, gentle exercise, head massage, self-reflection, and yoga.
In total there were 10 experiences, each eight minutes long, and I moved — or was guided — between them through a labrynthine succession of curtained walkways created within what might have been an open-plan office. The preponderance of heavy drapes muffled sound and lent the atmosphere an oppressive, slightly dusty, feel. It could have been sinister but in each cubicle a very nice young person dispensed a healing therapy. Sometimes it was talking, sometimes something physical like gentle, guided movement or a decorous head and shoulder massage. At one point I donned a VR headset for an artificial journey through a forest. At another, I listened to a story.
Since the experience was tailored to the individual — yes, I’d already filled in another of those famous Riptide questionnaires — I can’t speak for everybody. But in my case, the wisdom imparted was of a general, and universal, kind. How could it be otherwise in the time available? I was invited to take more time for myself — but there was no opportunity to delve specifically into some of my deeper issues, such as the emotional illiteracy and gas-lighting of my Boomer upbringing, or the baffling, inter-generational, trauma that has sometimes left me feeling as though all my life I’ve been carrying a double helping of fear.
“What burden are you going to set down?” I was asked.
So perhaps too much specificity wasn’t necessary. Most of us, the modestly affluent, reasonably fortunate, “worried well”, are struggling with broadly the same stuff. It’s easy to sneer at wellness culture. To observe that it is mostly the preserve of those lucky individuals who have time and money enough to indulge themselves.
But contemporary life is difficult. Our ancestors faced their physical hardships armed with moral certainty, low expectations, and defined social roles. Whereas, to misquote economist Milton Friedman, “we are all existentialists now” — expected, in a society that glorifies ‘success’ whilst undervaluing care workers, to construct our own individual life stories choice by painful choice.
But the pursuit of individualism comes at a price which is higher than our society is prepared to acknowedge. With the breakdown of sex roles, traditional family structures, the decline of religion, the deeply destablising demands of hyper-mobile globalised capitalism, most of us face personal conflicts that are impossible to reconcile. The result is stress, a plethora of lifestyle diseases and the startling statistic that 8.32 million NHS patients received an anti-depressant drug item in 2021/22.
“What a pity they can’t offer this on the NHS.”
At the end of my therapeutic journey I was invited into a quiet room where I drank refreshing herbal tea and chatted with two other participants — the people who came before and after me. Both, in their different ways, were connected with or knew people who were connected with, the production. And a recurring theme of both our chat and the comment cards that were hung about the room was that the people who needed the experience most were the very ones unlikely to get it.
There’s a lot of hardship, violence and chaos out there which a ‘therapeutic experience’ such as this wouldn’t touch. But in a society that makes impossible demands on the sanity of the individual, even the more fortunate ones, it becomes necessary for the individual to take matters into their own hands.
“Take 80 minutes to reflect and reconnect,” said the pre-show blurb. And that’s it in a nutshell. So many of us, including the super-achievers, appear to be coping but aren’t really.
“I didn’t even know I needed that,” was another great theme of the cards on the wall. And I set to musing that anyone who thinks that ‘theatre’ and ‘performance’ have no part to play in medicine has never worked in a hospital. But rather than sneaking the theatre in, talking obliquely about “the patient experience”, perhaps we should acknowledge its shamanic healing power.
For myself, I wrote one word:
GOODNESS.
Because for 80 minutes I’d been in the hands of strangers who genuinely wanted the best for me, devoid of their own selfish agendas.
Soon it was time to once more brave the deluge. I set off for the railway station through heavy rain thinking I’d had a very pleasant time but sceptical that there would be a lasting effect.
“What burden are you going to set down?”
I can’t say I was consciously thinking about this question. But two days later, I deleted my Twitter/X account. Not just deleted it but removed the app from my phone. This time permanently.
Intermission finishes today (sorry!) but you can follow Riptide Theatre’s further adventures by signing up for their newsletter here. I’m having a break now but I’ll be back at the end of January. Have a great Christmas!
Liz x