About the Film

I was commissioned by Deershed Festival to document The Wilderwood, an immersive theatre piece by Flanagan Collective staged across the 2017 festival, Deer Shed 8. Directed by Joe Hufton, the piece unfolded over three days in a corner of the festival called the Wilder Wild, in a stretch of woodland by the river set slightly apart from the main arena.

Two Camps in the Wilder Wild

The piece was built around two groups occupying the same patch of woodland. A company of explorers arrive and lay claim to the land, while a second camp, already living there, represents something closer to a real, rooted connection to the environment. Laura Riseborough, playing in the explorers’ camp, described it as “very much the comic relief,” set against the other camp’s more grounded spirit. Over the three days, conflict between the two groups gives way to storytelling, and eventually a shared celebration.

An Invitation, Not a Stage

There is no stage, no seating and no barrier between performers and audience. Sarah Langrish-Smith put it plainly: people can walk straight in, touch what’s there, and become part of the world rather than watch it from outside. Director Joe Hufton described the whole approach as choice-driven theatre, built around a single recurring question put to the audience: do you want to go on this adventure? Visitors are free to stay as long as they like, drift away, and come back later, and several of the performers spoke about audiences returning across the festival with objects the company had given them on an earlier visit, evidence that the relationship was building over days rather than a single encounter.

Built Over Two Weeks, Shaped by the Audience

The company spent two weeks developing the characters and the dynamics between the two camps before the festival began, and there is a loose plan for how the three days unfold, with set pieces returning roughly every two hours to give the piece some shape. But Joe Hufton was clear that the plan stays open to what the audience actually brings to it. Performer Simeon Oakes described the exchange at the heart of the show: the company offers the audience something prepared, and in return receives something back from them, an exchange he sees as close to what theatre is fundamentally about. Getting people who have already paid for a festival ticket to invest in a piece of free theatre alongside it is its own challenge, one Joe Hufton framed as part of an ongoing conversation about what theatre can look like at a festival, for Deershed and for festivals more widely.

Why This Kind of Work Is Worth Filming Properly

A piece like The Wilderwood only exists for the days it runs. Once the festival ends, whatever a company has to show for it, whether that is a funding application, a pitch to a festival programmer for next year, or simply the company’s own record of what they made, depends entirely on what was actually captured while it was happening. A show like this is genuinely difficult to document well on a phone, not because a phone cannot take a decent picture, but because whoever is holding it is usually also meant to be running the show. Sound in particular gets lost quickly outdoors, in wind, birdsong and a crowd of people talking at once, and a phone in someone’s pocket rarely stays out for the full shape of a three-day piece, catching a handful of moments rather than the way the whole thing actually built and changed. Filming something like The Wilderwood properly means being free to follow the piece rather than perform in it, staying close enough to catch what the audience experiences without getting in the way of it, and coming away with something a company can actually use afterwards rather than a folder of clips nobody quite has time to edit. For work this ephemeral, that record is often the only thing left once the woods are cleared and the festival has moved on.

Filming an Immersive Performance

Documenting a piece with no fixed stage and no set running order meant working the way the audience did, moving through the woodland rather than setting up in one place and waiting for the action to come to me. There was no single moment to capture, since the performance was built to shift and resettle depending on who wandered in and what they brought with them, so most of the filming stayed close and handheld, following performers and audience members as their own encounters unfolded rather than staging anything for the camera.