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Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance by Josephine Machon (review)

This ambitious book sheds light on the contemporary phenomenon of immersive theatre, now widespread both in the UK and globally, attempting to offer a new definition and a major theory for this practice in light of recent scientific ideas of sense-making, artistic pleasure, and space. Machon argues that the major agent in immersive theatre is (syn)aesthetics, a fusion of perceptual experience and sensate approaches to the practice. In Machon’s view, (syn)aesthetic performance is intuitive, instinctual, and imaginative, and breaks the boundary between the real and the imaginary. It privileges the present moment and plays with established norms. She advances an idea of immersive theatre that is essentially multidisciplinary and fully immersive when it manages to involve the audience, prioritizing the “me” through the senses and using space as part of the work. Machon writes not only as an academic but also from the perspective of a practitioner. Productions are described intimately, at times through secondand third-person accounts, and on occasion, supposedly in the cases when Machon has participated in the production as an audience member, in the first person. The book’s second part is organized around interviews and contains its most substantive material, engaging Christer Lundahl’s notion of the “situated self,” Silvia Mercuriali’s ideas about cinema and excitement, and Samantha Holdsworth’s view of immersive theatre as arising from the rejection of theatres that do not represent the masses.