Darkfield COMA at Assembly George Square Review
If there's one thing Darkfield do exceptionally well, it's making you question your own senses. COMA is perhaps their most claustrophobic experience to date, placing audiences inside a clinical dormitory where the only thing more unsettling than what you can hear is what your imagination fills in for itself.
The premise is wonderfully simple. After climbing into one of a series of narrow white bunk beds inside Darkfield's now iconic shipping container, you're invited to become part of a medical experiment. A small white pill sits beside your bed, although whether you choose to take it quickly becomes beside the point. As the lights fade completely and a calm, reassuring voice begins counting down, you're encouraged to let go. Easier said than done.
Like all of Darkfield's productions, the real star of the show is the extraordinary binaural sound design. Voices move effortlessly around the space before suddenly appearing inches from your ear, creating the unmistakable feeling that somebody is standing right beside you. It's astonishingly convincing. Combined with the subtle sounds of curtains opening, footsteps moving around the room and whispered conversations between unseen patients and staff, the experience constantly keeps you second-guessing what's real and what's only happening inside your own head.
The addition of scent works brilliantly too. The smell of fresh coffee, lingering aftershave and the sterile cleanliness of a hospital ward quietly drift through the container, grounding the experience in something oddly familiar before making that familiarity feel deeply uncomfortable. It's these tiny details that make DARKFIELD's work so effective. Nothing feels overplayed, yet every sensory cue gently nudges your imagination further down the rabbit hole.
What I particularly enjoyed about COMA is how powerless it makes you feel. Unlike many immersive experiences, you're not asked to move, solve puzzles or interact with performers. Instead, you're completely still. All you can do is listen. That loss of control becomes the experience's greatest strength, with moments of genuine tension created not through cheap jump scares but through anticipation and suggestion. By the final moments, I found myself questioning whether certain things had actually happened or whether my brain had simply decided they had.
My only slight reservation is that the narrative feels a little less focused than some of Darkfield's other productions. While FLIGHT and SÉANCE build towards a clearer thematic conclusion, COMA is more interested in atmosphere than resolution. That ambiguity won't work for everyone, and I occasionally found myself wanting a little more from the story beneath the incredibly effective sensory design.
Even so, COMA is another triumph from Darkfield. It's unsettling, inventive and impressively restrained, proving once again that some of the most memorable theatre experiences happen when there's almost nothing to see. If you're prepared to surrender yourself to the illusion, you'll leave questioning just how much of the experience came from the show—and how much came from your own mind.
COMA is playing at Assembly George Square at various times at 30 minutes until 31st August
★ ★ ★ ★
Written by Liam Arnold for Theatre and Tonic, August 2026.
