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Whenever I tell people about new blockbuster larps or immersive theatre, they invariably lament they always hear about them too late – so let me tell you about something that isn’t sold out and will give you a great and affordable introduction to the cutting edge of immersive art in the UK: Voidspace Live.

Voidspace Live is a lo-fi festival of interactive theatre, games, larp, and playable art happening in London on the weekend of 7-8 June 2025. It’ll have over 30 shows, fifteen of which are premieres, a five-room fully playable exhibition, four larps, two Jubensha, interactive Shakespeare, and plenty more. Check out the programme for Saturday and Sunday.

I’m especially excited because artists behind experiences I’ve previously covered, including The Manikins, Bridge Command, The Key of Dreams, and The Smoke, are presenting new work. There are very few festivals like Voidspace Live where you can see such a wide range of art so quickly, and even fewer that are this easy to reach: the venue, Theatre Deli, is right in the City of London, a stone’s throw from three different tube stations.

Tickets are £55 per day (£30 concessions). I will be there both days! If you come, I promise to say hello!

I’m also looking forward to the social side of the festival. A big part of the fun of these things is talking in the bar after a game or larp or show, not just with other participants but with the artists themselves. When else do you get to do that? As artistic director Katy Naylor told me, “no-one is going to enforce a creator/audience divide or hide in a VIP lounge.” That’s a world away from immersive industry clubs where entry costs hundreds or even thousands of pounds.

Katy is also responsible for the Voidspace Zine, a brilliant resource of essays and interviews with people making immersive theatre and interactive fiction and participatory art of all kinds. Here’s my brief chat with Katy about the festival, which has been edited for clarity and length:

Why is it important to have a festival that combines all the different kinds of art forms that Voidspace Live does?

Interactive theatre, arthouse games, performance art, and larp all invite the participant to become incorporated into the performance in some way. They all invite co-creation and a form of engagement that is magical. And yet they often are seen as completely different things, attracting different audiences. 

If you put all of them together, under one roof, and encourage people to take a punt and try something new, they love it. You find that if you like “this sort of thing”, you’ll like other “this sort of thing”s too, even if you thought you wouldn’t. 

Why did you decide to run a festival after writing Voidspace? It’s an unusual step, especially for a solo writer!

I think the idea for a festival came about to prove a point! Voidspace started as an online zine to encourage indie lit writers to experiment with interactive writing: interactive fiction is its own community with its own competitions and jams, and it seemed wild to me that these two very similar worlds didn’t speak to each other. That germ of commonality spreads beyond the writing community: interactive theatre, dance, performance art, indie games, larps. 

I started out by interviewing creators and publishing listings and got increasingly frustrated by how engrained the division can seem. The theatre folks look askance at the environmental folks, who look askance at the larpers, etc. 

And so the idea for a festival was born: get a bunch of people under one roof with a bunch of these things, on a single ticket so there’s no risk in trying something outside their usual frame of reference, and they’ll finally understand what I’ve been banging on about for so many years: that these forms have more to unite them than divide them. It gets participants and creators thinking in new ways, and everyone has a bloody good time in the process! This is why it’s important that the festival is over a single weekend. If it was spread over a fortnight, the dance people would go to the dances, the theatre to the theatre, and so on. 

Financially, it’s bonkers, especially if – as we do – you want to pay your artists decently and not take income from submission fees. It’d be a lot less risky to run this thing over a month and do a door split on 30 shows, than offer a single ticket and fixed fee and hope we sell enough. But it’s the only way to create the open, try-anything-once environment that’s crucial to our mission. 

Does Voidspace Live have any institutional funding/support or is all funded via ticket sales?

Nope. We tried for Arts Council funding a few times, but it’s hard to communicate the value of the festival when they don’t necessarily have a grip on the power or importance of lo-fi interactive art (i.e. not just the stuff that relies on big tech), or the community’s need for this sort of space. 

We’re lucky to have received a lot of support in kind from Theatre Deli, our programme partner, and to have had some very generous donors through our crowdfunder. Without some form of subsidy, it’s just not possible to make something like this work.

Despite this, the bulk of our funding comes from ticket sales. If people want to see this sort of work happen, the best way to support it is to buy a ticket. You’ll be supporting so many creators, and get to have a brilliant day or weekend in the bargain. Easy!