Aionos is a hugely ambitious experiment which promises too much, and delivers all too little. One group of actors is on the stage in Edinburgh; another gathers every day in Toronto. The two are connected not by mere video-link, but through virtual-reality technology in a simulated world. It’s billed as “not just a new show, but a new way of working” – collaborative storytelling for the metaverse.
But the story they’ve chosen is, simultaneously, way too complex and oddly slight. We’re on a space station in the far future, where gods drawn from different beliefs meet and mingle. Egyptian god Anubis – very loosely equivalent to Death – is the host of a reality TV show, themed around judgement of the recently deceased. In the face of falling ratings and under pressure from her dad, Anubis sends fellow god Thoth down to Earth, to work his charm on a couple of children and trick them across to the afterlife. It’s a dark, dark premise, but there’s no real acknowledgement of that; it seems to be something we’re just meant to accept.
Thoth descends to Earth by donning a virtual reality headset, and we – the audience – duly look on as some distinctly 1990’s-style computer graphics appear on the big screen. In blocky avatar form Thoth plays the tour guide, meets the children (who, if I have understood it right, were being controlled by the actors in Toronto), and wanders into a temple. The programme says that they’re “navigat[ing] spacetime to recover an ancient technology” but I somehow completely missed that bit.
Watching other people play video games can be fun – as the popularity of Twitch proves – but a lot of the time in Aionos is spent watching the live actor laboriously manoeuvre his avatar around, and/or randomly waving his arms. The VR segment’s not entirely without humour and there’s a mildly empowering twist at the end, but it’s scant reward for such a heavyweight set-up.
There is something interesting at the core of Aionos: the way that two sets of actors an ocean apart are meeting, live, in a virtual world. But that core concept is lost among the convolutions of the plot and unless you’ve read it in a blurb somewhere, I’m not sure you’d even realise it was happening. Much more focus, much more sharpness, and a much more fit-for-purpose story will be needed before this experiment can fizz.