Daniel Nicholas blogs on making a show with the Difference Engine

I’m not sure what year it was, maybe 2015 or 2016, could even be earlier than that. I was living in Leicester, working part time at Tesco’s, when I went to a talk about this new software made by Talking Birds Theatre Company, that can give captioning in real time to theatre performances, straight to audience members’ phones; the Difference Engine.

Flash forward five or so years later, and I’m gearing up for my first tour (pandemic pending) of my first theatre show ‘Eugene’ which has the Difference Engine at the heart of it.

When I first found out about the Difference Engine, it was the idea of sending messages to audiences’ phones that grabbed me most: could these messages be secrets that the characters on stage don’t know about? Whilst at the same time captioning what the actors on stage are saying.

The creative possibilities were racing through my head. But the big one was the multiple channels, having different audiences receiving different things that could influence how different audience members see the show – and therefore with everything that happens on the stage being the same, individuals will be seeing the show through a different lens, without realising it. This goes hand in hand with making a piece of theatre for the d/Deaf community.

That has been the goal of my show Eugene, to give audiences different ways of seeing the same thing on stage at the same time. Eugene is about a millionaire Steve Jobs-esque figure launching the first super human A.I. It all takes place at a press conference/ product launch. And although Eugene the A.I. appears on a screen at the back of the stage, it also talks to audiences directly throughout. What messages they receive, however, depends on what option they selected on the Difference Engine at the start. The character on stage and the A.I. interact: it’s very much a 2 person show, but with one actor.
It’s been difficult, don’t get me wrong, coming up with a script that works on multiple levels, and then inputting that into the Difference Engine. But I think the results (will be) worth it, when for the first time I have a show that’s accessible to d/Deaf audiences, where different audiences have a different experience at the same time: I’m happy to do the hard work, no question.

I think there’s a danger, sometimes, of tacking on accessibility to shows or products, it being thought of as an afterthought, or squeezed in when all the work is done – sometimes it just isn’t. But if I’ve learnt anything from this process, it is that by harnessing the resources that are there for accessibility, like the Difference Engine, something new and innovative can be created that can be enjoyed by many more people. And why wouldn’t you want to do that?

https://ingeniousfools.co.uk/project/daniel-nicholas/
Eugene was the Edinburgh Fringe National Partnerships Award Winner for Yorkshire 2020/21