At first blush, The Austen Experience seems the stuff of Janeite dreams: A spring weekend spent swanning around a Swedish castle in Regency finery, waited on by servants and courted by eligible gentlemen.
“Come and live out your very own Austen fantasy in a country estate,” the website urges. “Be romanced by your very own Austen hero.” It’s Austenland come to life!*
Look a little more closely, however, and something more complicated than Janeite wish-fulfillment is going on. Designed by a Swedish artists’ collective, the Austen Experience turns out to be an immersive live-action role play (larp) with a social-justice mission.
“On the surface, this larp is about . . . playing cards, attending workshops, dancing at a ball, gossiping, flirting and drinking tea,” the project’s website explains. “On a deeper level, however, this is a larp about what humans can do, once they stop considering another group to be human. It is a larp about privilege, and the underprivileged.”
The larp mashes up Austenland tropes (Regency manor house, pampered heroines, dashing heroes) with elements drawn from the 2016-22 HBO series Westworld, which centers on a futuristic amusement park in which androids are forced to fulfill human patrons’ every desire, no matter how twisted or cruel.
It's an intriguing way to shine a light on the oppressive social structures that readers of Austen's fiction glimpse just off stage--or choose to ignore--and, by extension, the oppressive social structures that undergird our own lives.
Since 2017, Atropos Studios, the Sweden-based non-profit behind the Austen Experience, has run more than a dozen larps on a variety of themes, including a previous Austenland/Westworld mashup in 2021.
This year’s iteration will take place twice, from April 3-6 and April 7-10, at Rockelstad Slott, an honest-to-goodness seventeenth-century castle located ten miles from Stockholm. (Signup officially closed many months ago, but it’s still possible to get on the waiting list. And in case you’re wondering, English will be the official larp language.)
The Austen Experience’s paying guests—prices range from 400 to 800 euros, or about $410-$820—have a choice of characters. They can role-play the indulged heroines, or the employees of the unnamed Company running the Regency theme park, all designated as human. Or they can play the handsome heroes, a group that includes humans; human clones, known as androids; and AI bots designed to appear human. Those playing servants participate for free while supplying required cooking, cleaning, and administrative services.
The fifty-nine participants will be given pre-written descriptions of the characters they are playing and will improvise accordingly, obeying ground rules that include a ban on drunkenness and strict parameters for simulating kissing and . . . more than kissing.
Still, the improvisation has its limits: Although the oppressed androids and AIs may sometimes malfunction and require tweaking--ominously referred to as “reprogramming”--wholesale social change will be reserved for the post-larp world. “This is not a larp about a revolution,” the website notes. “There will not be an uprising at the larp.”
Clearly, Karl Marx would not approve. Would Jane Austen? Discuss.
* Thanks to indefatigable Janeite informant Tram Chamberlain for bringing this site to my attention.
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