Joe Strickland on Chronic Insanity’s new interactive digital theatre platform FableMosh

We spoke with Artistic Director and playwright Joe Strickland about Chronic Insanity’s new interactive digital theatre platform FableMosh. The platform launched on Monday 31st March with its first production Descension and will be releasing new shows monthly.

What inspired the creation of FableMosh, and how does it differentiate itself from other digital theatre platforms?

I just noticed that all the digital theatre platforms online only had shows from The National and The RSC and West End shows, but I didn’t see a home anywhere for the fringe and emerging theatre that I loved. I realised that this work was probably the work that deserved the most exposure, to help people reach more audiences, and was often the most daring, interesting, and though provoking. At a time when the big fringe festivals are too expensive to attend or disappearing, touring is harder than ever, and the opportunities for mid-career artists to keep practicing their craft vanishing with funding depleted from most organisations, it felt like a digital theatre platform for these audiences and artists would be a great idea. Add to that the accessibility and sustainability benefits of digital theatre and it was a no brainer.

 How did you discover and decide on which playwrights to feature on the platform?

We did a call out across the UK for playwrights to work with us on the opening season. We already ran the UK’s only digital theatre specific literary department, so we knew how to support artists in creating work for digital audiences if they hadn’t done that before. We worked with about half writers we already knew and half writers new to the company, talking them through the plan for the interactivity at that time and encouraging them to keep a digital audience in mind. People pitched us their ideas, or finished scripts, and we chose our favourite stories and scripts that we also thought would work together as a good season of interesting shows and concepts that would work well being performed online or for digital audiences.

With the rise of virtual performances in recent years, where do you see the future of digital theatre headed?

It’s difficult to say. A lot of larger cultural institutions started doing digital theatre and virtual performances and then turned fully 180 and stopped doing it. I think everyone is exhausted and no one has the capacity to rise to the challenge of establishing a digital audience, understanding them, and commissioning work to appeal to them rather than just recording what they have onstage onto an online platform. I think we had an explosion because of COVID, but we were seeing a rise in it in the years before then, so I think its development accelerated and ran out of juice a little bit and it’ll take a few years to reestablish it’s footing. However, when it does come back, it’ll be more foundational and fortified and should hopefully hang around for longer, especially once more people are convinced of its power to reach new audiences, tell amazing stories, and not threaten the idea of putting on shows in person, which a lot of people think it does even though we have lots of audience research showing that to not be the case in any circumstance.

What challenges did you face when developing FableMosh?

My god, is hosting videos online expensive or complicated! We ended up working with Vimeo to run our platform, and they’ve made it very easy for us, but for a long time we were struggling to figure out how best to find a home for the work we were making. We also had Innovate UK funding to create our first season of work for screens, audio, and VR playback and had to be very careful in how the stories were written, filmed, edited, and exhibited so that they still work as performances in all three media simultaneously. Also, we give the audience the opportunity to switch between performers and cast their own shows, and figuring out how to do that at all, let alone in a quick and user friendly way, was also a challenge. Happily, one that we succeeded in whole heartedly!

What inspired your own process when writing Homunculus?

I wanted to write a story that felt like a classic tragedy but for an online audience, without it needing to be something with too directly heavy as a topic. I was also watching a lot of YouTube of people who own exotic pets and seeing how their set ups would grow as their viewers did made me think about what the absurd and tragic end result of this might be if someone wanted to be the most successful version of this content creator at all costs, and then some. So the story of Homunculus follows someone who starts getting popular online for their pet frogs and then follows them as they go through the pursuit for attention from their followers that lots of content creators and then, when that doesn’t work, starts exceeding that in some really fun magic realism ways. I think it’s a really good example of what digital theatre can be, the traditional and established story telling structure of theatre and live performance mixed with the themes, characters, and settings of the online world and the stories that inhabit it. Traditional theatre tells stories about the traditional world, and digital theatre can do that about the digital world too.

What kind of impact do you hope the platform will have on the broader creative and theatre communities?

I know it’ll be a slow burn impact and we aren’t going to start out making a big splash, but we hope that slowly but surely, by adding more work to the platform, growing our audience sustainably, and espousing the virtues of this sort of digital theatrical spaces we can grow into the UK’s go to destination for online fringe theatre, especially if you want something that reflects the growing and unavoidable importance of online spaces in our daily lives in accessible and affordable storytelling. I also hope that it allows artists, who have recordings of their previous work that they aren’t able to tour or perform anymore, some outlet to allow that work to continue to live on and create some income for them in the form of royalties. All our shows pay out directly to the creators, so if you buy a ticket or subscribe to the whole library of work you are putting money directly in the pockets of the artists who created those shows.

Chronic Insanity’s first production Descension is live on the FableMosh platform now.To set up a trial or membership, go to: https://www.fablemosh.com