What We Mean When We Say Immersive: Shadows Over the Cam and Quiet Immersion

Part of the set of Shadows over the Cam. The set is not directly interacted with by cast; its function is contextual and tells the audience they are in an academic space or fellows office in Cambridge in 1926. Photo: Paul Ashley.

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Context: Shadows Over the Cam was a live improvised cosmic-horror show set in 1920s Cambridge, performed at the Corpus Playroom in January 2026. Framed as the public presentation of newly discovered academic research, the audience were invited to attend a new kind of 'lecture' that was a story or invented future, based on their research.

The performers built the narrative using atmosphere, language, and shared imagination rather than spectacle, drawing on suggested locations around Cambridge to explore power, belief, and the instability of certainty.

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The word ‘Immersive’ is possibly one of the most overused words in contemporary theatre at the moment. It is often used to describe experiences that are interactive, technological, or heavily mediated. But as Josephine Machon suggests, immersion is less about what physically surrounds an audience than about how they are positioned within a world, in other words, you feel like you are in something, rather than looking on at it.

Labels, Boxes, and Constructing Worlds

The shows that my company (The Ministry of Unplanned Occurrences) make are usually labelled 'improv' (though I prefer to simply refer to it as theatre) and I’m hesitant to label the show immersive in the way the term is commonly understood. However, I think it could lay claim the term 'immersive' in a quieter, more fundamental sense. Let me explain.

Lecture notice posted outside and around the theatre building. Photo: Paul Ashley.

The audience were physically in Cambridge, a city dense with academic authority. The venue itself (the Corpus Playroom) sits within the infrastructure of the University, metres away from its most recognisable landmarks. Tickets were booked through the ADC (technically a part of the University). All of this was real and very tangibly part of the audience journey.

But rather than asking the audience to forget that reality, the show gently reframed it. Before the story began, the audience were invited into a fictional layer that sat directly on top of the world they were already occupying. There were lecture notices and scribbled diagrams in the box office and on the outside walls; language, and behaviour suggested that they were attending the presentation of new research; they were given lecture 'notes' (one side appropriate to 1926, and the other 2026). Once this framing was accepted, the shift into the 1920s required very little effort. Time moved, but place did not disappear.

The Society of Ontology, Chaos, and Kathenotheism introducing their research methods to the assembled audience (and letting them know about strobe effects). Photo: Paul Ashley.

By situating the performance as research being presented for the first time, we invited the audience into a shared fiction without asking them to perform it; they were placed inside the event.

The audience were not asked to participate beyond this initial agreement, and three offers for locations in Cambridge. There was no ongoing interactivity, and this was made explicit (marking a clear distinction between the often confused sister of immersion - interaction). After the initial introduction to the lecture, we returned to familiar theatre rules: you watch, we tell. But because the fiction had been contextualised as a unique form of public lecture, where new research was being discovered and presented in real time, watching happened from inside the event rather than at a distance.

Uncertainty, Instability, and Cosmic Horror

Brothers experiencing madness brought on by their visions. (Picture of Weds 14 Jan show taken by Paul Ashley)

Cosmic horror depends on uncertainty, instability, and the sense that meaning is provisional. Improvisation allows a story to be discovered live rather than presented as a finished object. Some nights produced tightly linked narratives; others offered thematic echoes across different characters and locations. In every case, the audience witnessed a world forming and fracturing in real time.

Like us, the audience are using their imaginations to create the events in front of them, sharing in the storytelling. We don’t attempt to recreate floods in the space using video, lighting, or sound (as you might imagine a more heavily mediated immersive piece to), instead we invite the audience to share the illusion (or, in some cases, delusion).

Arguably, this concern with perception and experience sits close to phenomenological questions that are central to contemporary philosophy: how we encounter the world, how context shapes understanding, and how certainty is constructed.

At the end of the show, the final layer was removed. We returned as ourselves, naming the company, the fact of performance, and the pleasure of having shared it. This part was important, as while the fiction has dissolved, and the journey remained legible.

The Thin Veil

One of the reasons I enjoy playing in a smaller space (as opposed to a proscenium theatre) as the audience are able to walk through the playing space. Photo: screenshot of video taken Sat 17 Jan.

So was Shadows Over the Cam immersive? I think it was, but not because the audience moved through space, controlled outcomes, or interacted with technology. It was immersive because it invited them to see exactly where they were differently for a while, and to agree to sit inside a story that was fragile, provisional, and shared.

Sometimes immersion isn’t about building a new world. Sometimes it’s about placing a thin veil over the one we’re already in.