Caroline Horton’s All of Me was a sell-out hit at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and won The Fringe Mental Health Award and The Stage Award for Excellence. The original stage show was conceived as an intimate and absurd exploration of wanting to live, wanting to die and what can happen when we sit together in the dark. Now Caroline Horton reunites with director Alex Swift (Mess, How to Win Against History) to bring audiences two new versions of the show – one an audio experience, the other on interactive gaming platform Twine – a new space for innovation for theatre practitioners but already an established forum for creatives making work about mental health.
The audio version of All of Me was recorded in Caroline’s living room during lockdown, All of Me: The Audio is an intimate, absurd exploration of wanting to live, wanting to die and what can happen if we sit together with the dark. Adapted from the stage show, Caroline, director Alex Swift and sound designer Elena Peña promise a dark audio trip about dark things. All of Me: The Twine, is Caroline and Alex’s first leap into the world of interactive digital work, where the player must navigate their own journey through the show. Twine is an interactive tool for storytelling popular with the gaming community and other subcultures.
Speaking about the new versions of the show, Caroline Horton said “It’s been fascinating exploring the existing work from new angles, for example with The Twine we were able to create a much stronger sense of the cyclical nature of recovery, the player can really circle and cycle and repeat sections, whereas in a 70 minute theatre show your progression is more linear.”
Ed Collier, Co-Director of China Plate said “All of Me was an unsettling and extraordinary piece of theatre. These two new interpretations take the heart of that show and reimagine it in two very different mediums. Experiencing the audio version of the piece recorded binaurally, Caroline seems to plug straight into your brain, immersing your imagination in her world. The Twine version is something completely new for Caroline, the creative team and China Plate. Somehow it places the audience at the heart of the story seemingly offering you agency in where it goes whilst drawing you further into the darkness making you complicit in her journey. These new pieces are testament to the extraordinary tenacity and resourcefulness that theatre makers have shown in finding ways to continue to reach audiences through 2020.”
