“You get the jitters just like you would in real theatre. “Before the show, you’re nervous,” says North. Characters stride across stages that are cantilevered together from in-game objects. The majority of audiences stumble across the performances accidentally in the wasteland, and sit to watch the show for free – or tune in on Twitch, where the company broadcasts every performance live. There are no ticketed seats, and the company makes no money. (Think about what that means for the play’s Mechanicals subplot: the audience settled in front of a computer screen, watching the cast being players, playing players, playing players, in a play.) We’ve got security on-site to take care of it.’” Occasionally, someone threatens to blow the stage up with a rocket launcher mid-performance, but most times, they end up watching half of Midsummer instead. “I tell the cast, ‘please don’t whip out your mini-guns on stage. “So during rehearsals you’ll often hear off-stage the ‘Kaching! Kaching! Kaching!’ of a hammer as an actor quickly hashes together the piece of clothing they forgot that day.” And having learned from the scorpion incident, North now hires guards to protect the production. “We have this crafting table where you can build your gear,” says North. “It’s just like a real theatre company, where you start with an idea and a few folks sitting together and figuring out what our season is going to look like,” he says.īetween shows, actors scour Fallout’s wasteland for costume parts. Hundreds of pages of script are shared with the crew, so set design and rehearsals can commence. First, North picks the play and adapts it. In this world, Shakespeare existed before the bombs fell, so it seemed logical that North and his friends could role-play a company keeping culture alive in the ruins of civilisation – like the troupe of actors in Emily St John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic dystopia, Station Eleven.Ī Fallout audience watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream Photograph: Bethesda/Wasteland Theatre Company It’s very desolate, very grotesque, very tragic, really,” says North.

“The Fallout universe lends itself really well to Shakespeare. In one quest, you meet a survivor who tries to turn super mutants away from their path of violence by bombarding them with Shakespearean recitations. Characters cry “once more into the breach, dear friends!” before venturing from the safety of home. A yellowing sign in a school corridor advertises auditions for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As they adventured together, they noticed that the Fallout games are peppered with references to Shakespeare’s works. The company was formed almost by chance, when North befriended a group of players in the wasteland. “It’s not a new idea we’re just doing it within the brand new medium of a video game.”

“Imagine a wandering theatre troupe in the 17th century going from town to town doing little performances,” says the company’s director, Northern_Harvest, who goes by his gamertag or just ‘North’, and works in communications in real life. This opens up endless opportunities for user-generated serendipity, and the Wasteland Theatre Company is one such experience: a delightfully unexpected thing for players to stumble upon in the devastation.Ī security guard at a Romeo and Juliet performance inside Fallout 76 Photograph: Bethesda/Wasteland Theatre Company

With “area chat” enabled they can even talk to each other through microphones, calling out to a passer-by on the dusty road. As you explore the crumbling husks of towns hollowed out by an atomic bomb, tumbleweed scuffs scorched sand, rusted signs advertising Nuka-Cola creak in the breeze, and you’re constantly on the lookout for irradiated things that want to maul you.įallout 76 is an online open world players travel wherever they wish and can bump into real-life strangers. The Fallout series is one of gaming’s most popular, famous for encouraging players to role-play survivors within the oddly beautiful ruins of alternate-history Earth. Dotted all across the world, they meet behind their keyboards to perform inside Fallout 76, a video game set in a post-nuclear apocalyptic America. The Wasteland Theatre Company is not your average band of thespians. You come to expect them when you’re performing inside a video game. “It’s just one of those things,” Bram shrugs, with the breezy nonchalance of an actor who is now used to these kinds of hiccups.

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