LAHORE: Just before you reach outside the set of the Caught: A Theatrical Escape Room, you are engaged by an actor who starts telling you about the SHO of the police station and how he can help you navigate in the game that you and your group is going to be a part of for the next 45 minutes.

The set has been installed at the Bari Film and TV Studios in Allama Iqbal Town where the Justice Project Pakistan (JPP) and the Olomopolo Media are performing a hybrid form of immersive theatre, performance art as well as a game.

There are no audiences and participants or attendees have to be a part of the whole scheme of things as they interact with the actors while investigating a murder case along with a police officer. While playing the game, they collect evidences led by the clues until the completion of the investigation. As they reach the stage of confessional statement of the accused, they face reality while the flawed investigation, a main part of the justice system, is exposed.

The immersive theatre performance that started on Friday is directed by Kanwal Khoosat and conceived by Edinburgh-based artist Ryan Van Winkle. It comes just before the World Day against the Death Penalty that falls on Oct 10 every year. The performance is based on the real story of a juvenile prisoner. It continues for different groups of participants from 10am to 10pm and each group gets 45 minutes.

REAL STORY OF DEATH PENALTY: Sarah Belal, the executive director of the JPP, present on the set, tells Dawn that the performance is based on a real JPP client, Aftab Bahadur, who was executed in 2015, a year after Pakistan lifted the moratorium on the death sentence. He was merely 16, a juvenile when he was arrested and accused of committing a triple murder. Aftab pleaded innocence until his execution at the age of 38. He was allegedly forced by police to leave fingerprints at the crime scene. His defence lawyer was appointed by the government who allegedly did not bother to defend him. The sole eyewitness also retracted his statement but despite that Aftab was executed.

Kanwal Khoosat says that though the plot has been borrowed from Aftab’s story but the rest of it has been woven fictionally.

Sarah says: “The JPP has been working since 2009, doing advocacy with the government as well as international organisations like the UN. Every year on the Day against Death Penalty (Oct 10), our focus is on the public awareness about different aspects of the death sentence.”

The Caught: A Theatrical Escape Room is also a part of the awareness campaign ahead of Oct 10 as the participants, members of the general public, get first-hand experience of how the police and justice systems function in the country.

IMMERSIVE THEATRE AND THE GAME: As the participants enter the premises of the police station as the recruits, they have to find clues that lead them to the evidence to be able to open the next room to proceed to the different stages of the investigation until they resolve the murder case.

“The biggest hook for the Olomopolo Media and personally for myself was the form of the production-- an escape room and immersive theatre as we would run this set-up 12 hours every day for three consecutive days. There was an aspect of performance art in the sense that this is a durational piece. There are two sets of actors and each set of actors have to perform for six hours per day,” says Kanwal.

The most interesting part of the whole production for her is the potential interaction between the environment, the audiences and the actors. “The immersive aspect comes from the form itself when you enter the set. There is no fourth wall when you actually get into the space where the actor is performing. This was a very interesting hybrid form that I have never done before,” she says.

The performance is not like traditional theatre as the main actors have to continuously improvise as they interact with different participants who come in groups of maximum eight people in each performance and there is no tight script as such.

“That’s the deal with performance art. The narrative is there or the basic plot like we know how we want the game to end and how to take the players along the narrative to reach the final conclusion. But every time though the ending is the same but the journey is different for each set of actors and players. If we want to substitute the dialogues, there are prompts while for the catalysts that take the narrative along, we have hints,” Kanwal describes the techniques used in the performance.

COLLABORATION: The performance is the result of international collaboration as it is conceived by Ryan Van Winkle who also wrote it with Deborah Pearson while games have been designed by Arron Illingworth.

“The idea of using the escape model is to make the participants understand how justice can be corrupted easily without too many questions and concern for the people who are being sentenced,” explains Winkle.

The performance makes the people feel like being a part of the system so that they may understand why it’s important to work for the change that’s needed in terms of eradicating death penalty or having a more serious discussion convicting people, sentencing them to death, he explains the concept of the performance.

“I thought of immersing the participants into the performance who would not know till the end that they were convicting the wrong person. The person that you found the evidence for through all the games you played is actually innocent and the end leads you to the realization that you have convicted a person wrong,” Winkle adds.

The Caught: A Theatrical Escape Room will continue on Saturday and Sunday.

Published in Dawn, October 7th, 2023