A Chelmsford swimming baths has turned Ballard’s prescient apocalyptic novel into a truly immersive performance. Our writer pulls on his trunks and dives in
It’s Saturday night in Chelmsford, and 100 people are waiting for security to admit us into a postapocalyptic hellscape. We aren’t queuing outside Wetherspoons, but standing in our swimwear in the changing rooms of the Riverside leisure centre.
We’re here for the world premiere of a performance inspired by JG Ballard’s The Drowned World as part of the Essex book festival. In 2018, director Ros Green commissioned a multimedia event called The Nuclear Option in a secret nuclear bunker in Kelvedon. Now she’s asked an outfit called Wet Sounds, which creates underwater listening experiences, to adapt Ballard’s dystopian novel. “Perhaps not that many people who come to the evening will have read the book,” she says. “My hope is that this will catalyse them to do so.”
No one applauds when the lights go up – because there are no norms for how to respond to this kind of performance
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