Interactive Clown Shows
Alistair has been training as a clown since 2018. Originally as a way to be a better host for The Incredible Playable Show, he became fascinated with the form as a way of engaging with emotions and allowing free-form creativity from the audience.
Since 2023 Alistair has been performing as clown characters in shows and cabaret sets that integrate clown play with technology.
How does it work?
By scanning a QR code, the audience is taken to a webpage where they can send text inputs to the show. The page will change dynamically to match the current scene. Alistair's software will take these to produce on-screen images, directions and voice lines that his character will respond to.
Alistair's stage performance is entirely improvised based on audience interaction. While a built-in structure has been created for the interactive acts that make the body of the show, where exactly they go and what kind of story develops is up for the audience and Alistair to develop together.
He has written in detail about the development process on his blog.
Digital Shows
My Date with Pierce Brosnan (30 mins)
Alistair's current half-hour show My Date with Pierce Brosnan sees his clown on a date with Hollywood legend Pierce Brosnan - played by a dummy in a Tuxedo.
Scan the voice lines for the dummy to say on-stage. There are picked at random by the software and read out aloud over the speakers. My clown's goal is to win the heart of her audience-voiced beau before the strike of midnight.
The date with Pierce Brosnan is the climax to a story which grows with the audience over several interactive acts, which variously see audience members ordering food to each other's seats, writing the clown's dating profile, and sending her from location to location on a musical honeymoon.
List of performances
- Improv Lab - Bristol Improv Theatre, October 2024, Bristol UK
- PLAY Hamburg 2024, November 2024, Stroud UK
My Date with Pierce Brosnan (7 min version)
The show is also available as a shorter cabaret set, playing out the game with the talking Pierce Brosnan dummy as a self-contained set. It has been run at the following events
- Scritch Cabaret, August 2024, Bristol UK
- RAM Theatre Festival, September 2024, Stroud UK
Analgoue Shows
For events without projectors, Alistair also performs clown shows with no physical components. Instead he uses props and audience-written letters as a means of getting the audience involved in his games.
Juliet's Love Letters (7 mins)
During the interval, Clown Juliet passes love letters to everyone in the audience and gets them to fill them in. During the performance she reads from these love letters and responds in rhyming couplets, improvising from whatever the audience have given her. However, within the soundtrack is the voice of her father, Lord Capulet, trying to catch her flirting with this room full of Romeos.
Will she find true love by the end of her set? Will she rally the support of her suitors to finally stand up to father? To stand up for love?!
List of performances
- Scritch Cabaret, October 2024, Bristol UK
- Owl on the Roof, December 2024, Bristol UK
The Christmas Goblin (10 mins)
Developed for Utter Rot and Poppycock at the Bristol Improv theatre. In the interval the audience were invited to write their letters to Santa. In the act, the Christmas Goblin has escaped from Santa's grotto but, when caught, is ordered to make the gifts requested by the audience before the strike of midnight. He does this on-stage with toilet roll tubes, gaffer tape and a little Christmas magic...
Tech Stack
Unity C#
The software running in the show, and displayed on the screen, is developed in Unity 2020 and coded in C#.
JavaScript PHP
The audience join in by scanning a QR code. This takes them to an HTML page that updates based on the current segment of the show. Here they can type in suggestions that are handled by PHP code in my server, and cached. Regular HTTP calls from a Python script to my server check for new inputs, and pass these on to the game instance.
ElevenLabs Text-to-Speech API
Voice lines for Pierce Brosnan are generated from API requests to ElevenLabs' AI voice generation. When the asynchronous API call returns with successful data, the data is converted into WAV format and played, with subtitles showing simultaneously on-screen.
Google Image Search API
Voice lines for Pierce Brosnan are generated from API requests
Python
A simple Python script polls for audience inputs and passes these on to the game software so it can handle them the same way it does Twitch API messages.