Come Bargain With Uncanny Things, Virtually Opera

Pit your wits against forces beyond our control in an immersive opera where the audience are also the creatives.

Come Bargain With Uncanny Things invites the audience to solve problems on the night, using everything means natural and supernatural, and with the help of 'bargainers'. The bargainers are singers who improvise around the spontaneous narratives.

Drawing on Parabolic Theatre’s open-ended ‘adaptive narrative’ work in interactive theatre, the audience’s choices, from how they treat the Uncanny Thing to who they help, will make a different show each night.

Creator Leo Doulton says, 'We wanted to make an opera that’s not just beautiful, but also fun. For all that it’s about our relationships and tender music, it’s also a place to enter a Gaiman and Le Guin-ish world of strange shadows and bargains, where it really feels like you’re doing magic.'

Two singers improvise as the audience solves a new problem in Come Bargain With Uncanny Things. Photo: Claire Shovelton

Virtually Opera is a fusion opera company, mixing opera with other forms of performance art. Its sketch comedy opera, The Perfect Opera, sold out at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe. By breaking opera away from old hierarchies, it hopes to make new kinds of entertainment.

The project has been supported by the Britten Pears Foundation, Tête à Tête, the Opera Awards Foundation, and the Royal Victoria Hall Foundation,

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Bargain With Uncanny Things is at the COLAB Tavern, 16 Harper Road, London, SE1 6AD. Performances are on 15, 16, 18,19, 22, 23, 25 Nov at 7PM, and on 27 Nov at 2PM