Pleasance Dome

A comedy veteran of well over quarter a century at the tender age of 43 (she did her first gig aged 14), everyone’s favourite lefty optimist Josie Long returns with the follow up to 2023’s well-received Re-Enchantment, which detailed her experiences with parenthood, Covid and moving out of London. We’re told Now is the Time of Monsters is a show about extinct megafauna, which is probably not the entire truth – the title comes from a Gramsci quote – but is almost certainly some of the truth (her kids have apparently been learning about the beasts of the Cenozoic era). 

This review is from London, October 2024. Arcade will play at thet 2025 Edinburgh Fringe, along with Darkfield’s Eulogy and Darkfield Radio. Blackout theatre specialists Darkfield – aka Glen Neath and David Rosenberg – have spent years crafting meticulously disorientating immersive worlds that audience members experience via sophisticated headphones-based binaural sound design, performed in entirely lightless shipping containers. On the whole, they feel like surreal, sinister dreams: evocative but you’re effectively a passenger – just along for the ride, with no real agency of your own, and as the (very short) shows wear on and you get acclimatised to the darkness I’ve generally found the whole thing starts to feel a bit sillier. Arcade is a clever and unsettling leap forwards, giving you a degree of agency as you’re stood at an old school arcade machine with a big button on it that you press to indicate ‘yes’ in the choose-your-own-adventure style story. You do not in fact play an arcade game, but the general understanding in the interactive story relayed through your headphones is that you’re an avatar named Milk in a game that you could either interpret as intended to be imagined as sophisticated VR or taken literally as a headphones game from Darkfield. Whatever the case, you’re thrust into a violent, absurdist dystopia and while one button might not sound like a lot of agency, when I got shot point blank in the head within about 30 seconds of starting after making an...