ONEOHONE’s The Teind takes the London Horror Festival into the world of long-form interactive theatre to great effect
“tHeY aRE very
DanGerOus”
One of the more inventive entries into the London Horror Festival was ONEOHONE’s The Teind, a one-on-one interactive horror story stretching out over three weeks. Over Whatsapp, text messages, phone calls, Twitter, blogs and even face-to-face meetings, you’re drawn into a strange and slightly surreal world of darkly-tinged fairytale.
As a choose-your-own-adventure, The Teind is entirely individualised (there’s at least eight different endings) and so I won’t be giving anything away about the story, that will be for you to discover when next the show emerges. But there’s still lots to talk about in Asia Osborne and Eleanor Rushton’s creation, not least the amount of invention it contains.
Though the show is designed to be fully interacted with, it can cope with differing levels of interaction, indeed you could just let it happen to you with no interaction at all. But there’s so much fun to be had in diving headfirst into the myriad ways in which this story has been constructed, every choice revealing new pathways, every brain-wracking puzzle sending you further down the rabbit-hole.
And it was all rather good fun and disturbingly addictive. The freedom to do as much as you like really works well – I started off fully engaged, tailed off a bit when life events overtook for a bit, but by the time deadlines were arriving, I was frantically WhatsApping and desperately bargaining away the…well, that would be telling!
I particularly loved the care and attention that went into the ending that you’re given and the list of statistics was genius, pointing out the huge variety of options that were on the table and seeing what else could have happened. It basically inspires you to do the whole thing all over again rightaway! One to look out for, if only work out what a teind is…
