The oldest problem with video in theatre is that a screen beats a body. Put a close-up above a stage and the audience watches the close-up, because a face four metres wide is more information than a face forty metres away. Most productions that use live camera end up accidentally making a film with actors standing underneath it.
Łukasz Twarkowski’s ORACLE, at Onassis Stegi in Athens, does not solve that problem so much as refuse to treat it as one. designboom’s account of the production puts it directly: “Theater and cinema happen at the same time.”
The apparatus
The stage is divided horizontally into two visual fields. Below is the action. Above is a screen showing live footage of that action, shot by camera operators who are inside the set, filming the actors from within it.
The set itself is modular — separate units each built around a corner, with walls and a ceiling. They can be joined in pairs, or arranged around the centre of the stage, to become rooms, corridors, or open frames that read as a street. Red LED strips outline the overhead frames and the floor, and the lighting resets the atmosphere scene by scene.
Two choices lift this above the standard live-camera staging.
First, the audience is filmed before the show starts and projected onto the screen. You arrive, you are recorded, you are displayed, and then the piece about computation and surveillance begins. That is the cheapest possible gesture and also an effective one — it establishes the screen as a thing that captures rather than a thing that shows, before a single actor appears.
Second, thermal and infrared imaging turns the performers into coloured figures on screen — red, blue and green. This is the formal heart of it. A thermal camera cannot see a face; it sees heat. Running the live feed through it means the screen above the stage is not a close-up at all. It is a different kind of information about the same body, available only through an instrument, and legible as the exact imagery of drone footage and border surveillance.
So the screen stops competing with the stage, because it is no longer showing the same thing better. It is showing what a machine sees.
The subject
The production moves between Alan Turing, the history of computing, and the emergence of artificial intelligence. Running three hours and forty minutes, it is long enough to be a durational work rather than a play with a thesis.
Turing is the right figure for a piece built out of surveillance optics, and not only because of the codebreaking. He was prosecuted under surveillance of his private life, and the apparatus that read his sexuality as a security problem is the ancestor of the apparatus that reads a heat signature as a target. A thermal camera pointed at an actor playing Turing is a very direct argument, made without a line of dialogue.
The dates, and the caveat about them
Here we have to be careful. designboom’s piece, published 20 October 2026, gives no performance dates. Onassis Stegi’s own season announcement and a Greek-language listing both place the Athens run at 15 to 18 October 2026 — so, if those are right, the run has already closed and designboom’s coverage is documentation rather than a preview.
We could not confirm this from the production’s own page. onassis.org/whats-on/oracle returns HTTP 200 and then serves an Imperva/Incapsula block page instead of content, so we have read nothing from the organiser’s listing directly and are relying on two secondary sources that agree with each other. Twarkowski is listed as an associated artist of Onassis Stegi, and a Piccolo Teatro page indicates ORACLE is also going to a Milan festival, with no dates given.
If you want to see it, Milan is the lead to chase, and the Onassis Stegi listing is the page to check from a browser rather than a script.
Why it is worth the note
Twarkowski’s recent work — Respublika among it — has been building a particular machine: long duration, live camera, a set you could walk through, and a refusal to let the video be subordinate. ORACLE looks like the most precise version of it, because the thermal imaging gives the screen a reason to exist that is not “a better view”.
Interactive art spends a great deal of effort getting an audience to touch something. A camera on the audience before the house lights go down achieves more participation than most sensor installations manage, and costs one camera.
Sources
- łukasz twarkowski turns theater into a live cinematic spectacle — designboom
- Onassis Stegi new season starts with world premieres, music, theater and new venues
- ORACLE — Onassis Stegi
- Łukasz Twarkowski — Wiener Festwochen
- Incontro con Łukasz Twarkowski — Piccolo Teatro