Zombie: Red Zone is a piece of immersive site-specific theatre that brings the zombie zeitgeist to life in a warehouse just outside the Christchurch CBD. We, the assembled audience, are a cluster of gormless civilians who have responded to an emergency beacon that’s been let off at an abandoned outbreak centre, and we’re sitting ducks out in the open.

Enter the military. Level-headed hard-ass Frosty (Bree Peters), unhinged hot-head Moose (David van Horn), cautious young gun Romeo (Simon London) and their grizzled, battle-weary Sarge (Benjamin Farry) are members of the Armed Rescue Coalition tasked with keeping us safe from both the shambling hordes of the undead (played by dozens of very up-for-it volunteers) and militant groups of human scavengers.

Inside the (very relative) safety of the centre we are briefed on the new world order – mysterious infection, global pandemic, the dead rising, societal collapse – and things become more complicated. The centre isn’t entirely abandoned, and as we’re corralled through the space we encounter others who have been irrevocably shaped and damaged by the apocalypse and we come face to face with some uniquely man-made atrocities.  

Zombie: Red Zone is a wonderful piece of world building. From a technical perspective, an extraordinary amount of time, thought and effort has gone into making this world work, both conceptually and as a functioning space. The show incorporates CCTV and other AV elements, explosions, gun fire, a speeding vehicle and a fair amount of moving the cast and audience around, on top of sound, lighting and a great deal of very detailed set dressing. The show’s technical choreography is slick; whoever is stage managing things is achieving amazingly at what looks to be a bastard of a job. 

The performances, too, are committed and compelling, especially given the necessary challenge of wrangling large numbers of sometimes rowdy and unpredictable crowds. The script, by performers London, van Horn, and Farry, nicely balances pathos and tension with some A-grade scene chewing. I am particularly impressed with how it works its way through well-established (and hotly anticipated) tropes without ever feeling overly contrived or derivative. Instead, we are invited to watch the characters face and work through serious moral dilemmas that don’t always resolve in our favour. 

There are two possible ways of experiencing the show – one that sends you to a technical suite and one that sends you to a medical bay, before everyone meets up again – and at the producer’s behest I go to the show twice. It might be because I do it the second time round but I find that the med-bay storyline stands on its own much better, perhaps because its outcome and the plot points that it establishes have a causal impact upon both groups, and as the space is slightly larger it’s easier to get a sense of what is happening. This is not the case for the other room, which delves more into some broader philosophical and thematic issues such as the nature of scientific hubris, the conceptual conflict between biblical and secular apocalypses, and the extent to which people will go to help their loved ones.  

I understand that the creators are interested in developing it further and in adding more rooms, and the challenge will be to ensure that each group has all the story information they need for the story’s climax. Each storyline, though, ably cuts to the heart of the archetypal zombie apocalypse narrative, for these stories are never really about the undead. Instead, they interrogate what it is to be human through asking how far people will go to survive in a world in which social order has collapsed.

The piece markets itself as a mixture of immersive theatre and gaming, but whatever specific gaming elements exist may have been a part of the daytime ‘expansion pack’ component of the show, which I’m unable to attend. Most of our participation as audience members is at the instruction of the cast, so it is less properly interactive than I had expected. This is not a criticism, rather a reflection on the expectations set up by the press pack, which suggests an explicit blurring between the traditional roles of the audience and the performers. As such, after a while the personal (rather than the narrative) stakes don’t feel that high for our participation has no real bearing upon the outcome. 

In some ways this isn’t a bad thing, as it allows us to watch the story play out and experience the space itself, even if it’s a slightly more passive and traditional experience than the alternative. However, if (like me) you’re not particularly tall, if you’re not near the front of the crowd you may miss key pieces of plot and action, such as a nice little set piece involving a chainsaw. As both an audience member and a critic I find this to be a bit frustrating. It’s clear that a great deal of consideration has gone into the plotting and staging of the show, as well as its logistics, but it’s too easy for these elements to be missed or lost purely by virtue of the fact that you’re clumped into a group of 80 – 100 people that’s been told to get into the corner so as to avoid potential zombification. A quick fix would be limit the audience size or to tell us shorties to get to the front during the safety briefing. 

I find that this is accentuated in the piece’s finale. This sequence pulls me out of the story, even though it’s built up to be the natural conclusion to the action, and my first time through I’d missed some key information and didn’t realise what had just happened. This is the first time that the show feels like a game, for where the story itself has been a thoughtful interrogation of the limits of the human spirit, the ending is a lark – more horror maze or zombie bullrush than long dark night of the soul. I suspect that such cohesion could be achieved through even the briefest of denouement. I come out the other end, both times, thinking “hang on, what…?” and wanting to either hear more from – or to be able to narratively say goodbye to – the characters that had shepherded us to safety, especially as the piece is a brisk 45 minutes long..

These dramaturgical issues don’t stop Zombie: Red Zone from being bloody good fun, and I was thrilled to be able to go twice. I appreciate that the creators of this show had enough faith in the often reticent Christchurch audience to bring this down from Auckland. The creators absolutely succeed in their quest to sneak a bit of alternative theatre into the local diet, and they totally nail the genre.

To future audience members: the use of the term ‘Red Zone’ (thankfully) has absolutely nothing to do with the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes. Wear sturdy non-slip shoes, dress warm, and make sure you’re not wearing anything you don’t mind getting fake blood on, although in my case the big smears of gore Frend-ed right out. The Zombie Apocalypse has never been so washing machine friendly.

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