Immediacy has a physical and a dialectic aspect. I think what you’ve pointed out is that I missed the way that some site-specific theatre has successfully exploited the physical elements of immediacy: putting you truly in the moment, even if you can’t ‘affect’ the action, is infinitely more compelling and truly different from television or film.

My thought was for that which is left to be explored by exploiting the dialectic possible with the immediacy of theatre. Actors and audience can feed off and contribute to each other unendingly within the given time and space of a performance – and I feel there is much work still to be done to realise the potential this affords.

There’s no doubt that quite a lot of site-specific or allegedly immersive work does indeed “merely change the physical position” of the performance, albeit often with striking results. But it’s going too far to claim this as a characteristic of the whole genre; the best site-specific theatre really does use the location as a driver of immediacy, to generate an experience you couldn’t get from red-button multi-screen TV.

I’m not convinced a play must necessarily “go interactive” to achieve that. Consider, for example, Badac Theatre’s The Factory, a re-enactment of a Nazi death camp where pretty much the whole point was that the audience *didn’t* have any control. Now The Factory did get some very mixed reviews, but there’s no doubt that a big segment of its audience found it profoundly affecting – a response it’s hard to imagine so many people having to a conventional play.

Ultimately, I feel the objective of (almost) all site-specific, immersive, or interactive theatre is to make the audience feel they’re part of the story – as a mechanism to draw them into a deep and, yes, immediate engagement with the play. And if their role in the story is as a helpless observer, a powerless victim or an acquiescent conspirator… well, is there really a problem with that?