Choose Your Own Documentary, Soho Theatre

This February sees the London debut of Edinburgh Fringe First Award-winning stand-up story Choose Your Own Documentary: an audience-directed comedy loveletter to the Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks of the 1980s and ‘90s. 

This is a deftly-structured interactive show featuring – just like the books – hundreds of potential endings and directions. You, the audience, preside over these by way of an interactive keypad input system built into the show. Your guide in the endeavour is big-name-to-be Nathan Penlington, whose charming and utterly compelling big-stage debut this is.

It’s the true story of a series of mysterious diary entries Nathan found scrawled in the pages of a book bought on eBay two years ago, and the tortuous journey he embarked on to find out who wrote them. The story can veer off in any one of 1500 directions, leading Nathan into four continents and the paths of a host of assorted oddballs: from sword-swallowers to graphologists to the 87-year-old Choose-Your-Own pioneer himself, Edward Packard. Will Nathan succeed? Will his efforts come to naught? Will he be hexed en-route by a malevolent nixie? The choice is yours.

Nathan has been one of our ones-to-watch since we saw him experimenting with the Choose-Your-Own format to a rapt audience at the Bloomsbury Theatre in 2012. Eighteen months on, with joint Southbank Centre and Arts Council backing as well as a mashup of new film, interview and spoken-word material, we can’t wait to see where this delightful little show is going next. Only one way to find out…