“Thought’s as valid a method of travel as any other these days.”

“Except, it’s not really, is it?”

This was the exchange that stuck out to me most during Adult Children, one half of a double bill of shows at the Burton Taylor. Both Adult Children and its companion piece, All Kinds of Limbo, take place wholly with the medium of virtual reality. Led into a blank stage space, you sit on a bench, don your headset and earphones and are greeted with an exact replica of the Donmar Warehouse. The Donmar produced Adult Children, alongside ScanLAB Projects and Trial and Error Studio, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the aim to capture the uncanny detachment brought on by isolation and remote connection.

The centrepiece of the setup is a transparent cube, within which rooms manifest with the technical minimalism of an architectural illustration. Bodies move fuzzily through the room as though the stuff of memory. The experiment is admirable, and in places the VR is doubtless effective in conveying the odd sense of both proximity and intangibility that characterised any meeting with a loved one over the last two years. At one point one of our dual protagonists, A (Jodie McNee) sat next to me on the bench I occupied. A is both desperate for and fearful of contact; she engages in risky, rule-breaking hookups, drives cross country to look through the window of her unknowing mother from the confines of her car. The knee-jerk instinct to interact with a figure close enough to touch, followed by the realisation that you’re restricted from doing so, sums up A’s (and our) collective frustrations of the pandemic in microcosm.

You are encouraged to be hyperaware of the space around you and who occupies it. Key details can be missed in the peripheral if you don’t look for them. Working nurse and mum B listens to A’s account of her lockdown fling while on the toilet – but turn to look behind you and you can see A relaying her half of the conversation from her parked car. It’s a clever dramaturgical choice, reflecting the heightened attention to others’ boundaries that informed our every move under COVID.

However, in a post-restriction setting the concept does lose quite a bit of its power. You’re free to observe the space, but not explore it. The piece does draw attention to this; virtual theatregoers appear in the surrounding seats as an anonymous narrator describes the ability to ‘view from a safe distance’ within theatrical settings, much like A viewing her mother from within her own enclosed space. But the analogy isn’t enough to detract from the fact that we are ultimately viewing a replication of a theatre, at which point one has to ask – is this really an experience only VR could achieve?

Adult Children was initially borne of restriction, when the Donmar space was closed for essential works, and its implications for accessibility in general are hugely exciting. But because it centres so heavily around recreating this specific theatrical space, it feels like it’s hampered itself from fully exploring the capabilities of the medium, from the largely static experiences of audience members to the rendering of our digital players. I assume the slightly blurred detail of the figures might represent the sense of ephemerality brought about by our imposed distance, but it skews a touch too heavily towards realism for it to land. I’d be more intrigued if ScanLAB had used the potential VR offers to play more heavily with abstraction (as in, for example, the video game Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture). But as it stands it just feels insubstantial.

All Kinds of Limbo has no such hesitancy however. In this half, the audience is mobile, able to move freely throughout the space. Turn your head, and you’ll find three portals; one to desert landscape, one to forest, and one to ocean. A cube floats into the centre, which flickers to life with the face of writer and vocalist Nubiya Brandon. But unlike the figures of Adult Children, Nubiya is not here to be contained. All of a sudden she is manifested in front of you in the middle of a highway stretching towards an orange city skyline. It’s a testament to Brandon’s phenomenal stage presence that she can make such a connection within this digital space – her eye contact is intense and sincere, her movement within the space expansive and engaging.

At only 10 minutes long, the journey is a whirlwind as Brandon guides us through an exploration of her identity via a soundscape of musical genres brought to the UK by its Black citizens - reggae, grime, calypso. Each accompanying sequence is minimal but visually arresting - Brandon stands resplendent in an orange jumpsuit and natural hair on a rotating platform amid a shower of glowing spheres; now she backbends as though dodging bullets through a tunnel of black and white stripes; now she descends on an unfurling carpet surrounded by an orchestra lit like a casino.

Here, the VR is much more dexterously employed, the tightrope between immersion and detachment informing the fragmentation of Brandon’s sense of self. The quick pace works well to communicate her disorientation, jumping between abstract signifiers of Black identity while never fully inhabiting any singular one. Brandon is quick to point out that she does not wish to be seen as a monolith for the Black British experience. She is, in her own words, ‘a kaleidoscope’; she has speculations as to her heritage but she does not owe it to you to explain or be explicable, choosing instead to embrace ambiguity and turn it into autonomy.