Walking into Little Eggs Collective’s immersive play The Lost Boys felt like entering a Berlin nightclub. With thumping techno music and strobe lights, the Seymour Centre’s usually sleek Reginald Theatre had been transformed into a warehouse rave. A mysterious troupe of suited dancers greeted us on arrival, completing the grungy underground vibe and sending the small opening night audience into a state of frenzied anticipation. We were free to move around, dance and even take selfies with the cast. This unorthodox opening really did immerse us in the world of the play.
Inspired by J. M. Barrie’s classic 1911 novel Peter and Wendy, The Lost Boys invites audiences to become part of the “Lost Boys tribe” — a pack of youthful misfits who will never grow up. In its experimental design, the play aims to incorporate themes of childhood fears and anxieties about entering adulthood, while immersing audiences in these themes. To propel the immersion experience, Seymour Centre’s Reginald Theatre is transformed into an entirely immersive environment, where audience members are explicitly asked to use their mobile phones (without flash photography), move around the theatre space to watch the performers from various angles, and applaud loudly to “gee up” each performer.
As directors Craig Baldwin and Eliza Scott state, the play is designed to create “an unforgettable adventure” for audience members.
“We’re creating a world where childhood fears and fantasies collide in an explosion of creativity and adrenaline. We’re bringing together dancers, musicians and actors to create a truly spellbinding experience for theatre-goers,” said Baldwin and Scott.
The Lost Boys is the brainchild of Little Eggs Collective, a Sydney-based independent theatre company that strives to deliver unique and modern theatre that incorporates a range of interdisciplinary mediums, including music, dance, and drama. In particular, the theatre company emphasises highly collaborative, accessible, timely, and compelling performances, as well as embedding innovation in every production it produces.
While the play was certainly innovative in its immersive theatre approach and delivered with compelling acting from cast members, a major flaw of this production was its lack of cohesion. Indeed, the play felt that it was aiming to fit too many ideas into its 60-minute running time. Each scene felt disconnected, leaving audiences confused as to the play’s overarching purpose.
In one part of The Lost Boys, the play switched rapidly from a scene of childhood daydreaming to a scene where the cast ran around on a stage in Adidas trackies yelling “LET’S GO!” to loud hip hop beats. Moreover, there were some scenes that were too long and not relevant to the play’s overarching storyline. Namely, there was one scene where two lost boys fought in animal onesies for over 10-minutes. This scene included no dialogue and when audience members were left standing, felt drawn out and superfluous. Although the play was, for the most part, fun to watch, the fragmentation that existed between different sections of the play was confusing and made it difficult to comprehend the various characters and storylines that were occurring.
Overall, the play’s constant shift in dramatic tone and lack of cohesiveness gave the sense that it did not know what it wanted to be or what it wanted to say. While this structure may have been an attempt to capture the experience of fragmentation that comes with growing up, the scattered patchwork of ideas were not woven together in an effective or nuanced way, leaving the audience a little lost and longing for a deeper connection with the characters.