A Midnight Visit: An immersive theatre experience in a North Melbourne warehouse

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re let loose in an abandoned warehouse building in Melbourne, with 36 maze-like rooms.

Each holds a different experience, a puzzle piece of one giant story.

One room, a period sitting-room, looks conventional at first – the walls are awash in a glorious buttercup yellow, with gold trimmed decorative mouldings and black wallpaper.

It looks like an olde-worlde room that’s been preserved in a time capsule.

When you enter, you might witness one character, Virginia, playing the piano and singing to her husband.

But if you happen upon the room when there’s no one in it, you’ll hear the sound of crashing waves, seemingly emanating from a painting on the wall that features a Napoleonic ship.

Looking for clues, you might walk around, open the piano stool and … well, you’ll see for yourself.

Welcome to the world of immersive theatre.

It’s a theatrical performance that audience members are invited to be a part of, rather than simply watch, by touching, experiencing, smelling.

And it’s here with A Midnight Visit, after successful runs in Perth and Sydney.

Inspired by the works of famous poet Edgar Allan Poe – English literature students will be quick to recite chunks of The Raven – A Midnight Visit is set in a dark, supernatural, Gothic realm.

In this build-your-own-journey experience, participants decide which room to enter and how long they stay there (within reason!).

It’s why it’s impossible to see the whole play in one hit; co-creators Danielle Harvey and Kirsten Siddle, directors of production company Broad Encounters, say that some people have seen it six or seven times.

The only given is that you’re in Poe’s world: sometimes dream-like, sometimes scary, sometimes funny, sometimes creepy.

And while it’s not a horror house – there are no jump scares, for instance – it’s still not for the faint-hearted, and one has to be 15 or older to purchase a ticket.

“We say we invite audiences to come with a curious mind and brave soul, and triggering that bravery and curiosity is what we enjoy,” says the show’s creative producer Siddle.

They picked Poe, says show director Harvey, because “he had such a huge influence on horror, mystery and fantasy genres. He was very prolific.”

“After him came people like Jules Verne, and what followed on [were things like] Stranger Things. The trope of looking at what’s buried under the floorboards – that came from his work. People who enjoy a horror film or a Miss Marple series will recognise his influence.”

But bringing their vision into fruition was a mammoth task, involving more than 100 creatives who took seven weeks to build the Melbourne set.

Says Siddle: “All the rooms are beautifully detailed and we’ve very conscious that with a work like this, the audience needs to be able to open things up, pick things up, and the finishes need to be of a high quality and durable. It really needs to feel real for the audience as well.”

For Harvey, a self-described pop culture fan, “I feel like this world that we’ve created in A Midnight Visit is for people who’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be inside a David Lynch film”.

A Midnight Visit \ 222 Macaulay Road, North Melbourne, July 30-September 15.

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