We sat down for an exclusive interview with Terry O’Donovan, co-creator (alongside Dapha Attias) of I Do, which returns on a UK tour in 2026 to mark the 20th birthday of Dante or Die. This hugely successful immersive hit, with text by Chloë Moss, celebrates the beautiful mess of human connection — an intricate portrait of love and fear, told through Dante or Die’s signature blend of intimacy, detail, and cinematic theatricality.
Full tour details and ticket links below but I Do opens in London on 20th January until 8th February
What made now the right moment to revisit I DO, and what does this revival reveal about how your artistic thinking has evolved over 20 years?
As we approached turning 20 it’s been impossible not to reflect. When we first mentioned reviving a show to celebrate this anniversary, Daphna and I immediately said I Do. It felt like I Do was a gear shift for us. Our work previously had our hearts on our sleeves, it had a distinctive approach to choreography of space and audience, and an energy that brought audiences on physical journeys that was driving the work.
When we made I Do in 2013 we knew that we wanted story and dialogue to match those elements. At that moment in time, I had recently married in Belgium as same-sex marriage was legal there, and still not legal in the UK; and Daphna was pregnant with her second child and didn’t want to get married despite familial and societal pressure. So many of our friends were starting families and choosing whether or not to get married. All of this led us into a constant stream of conversations about weddings, relationships, the meaning of commitment . At the same time we’re interrogating the legalities that ‘protect’ a married couple. The live experience is visceral, detailed and incredibly intimate with the theatricality of repeating action despite the up close, hyper naturalistic performance style. We’ve always loved the synchronicity between site, story, form and content. We’ve never revived a production before. So doing it now, with 12 years of growing up for Daphna, Chloë and I means that we’re re-evaluating the stories we’d originally told, and digging deeper.
We’ve also created a trainee scheme for the production. We have 4 early career trainees – a director, producer, stage manager and performer. We wanted to create opportunities that we would have liked to have when we were starting out 20 years ago.
How has your relationship to site-specific storytelling shifted as audiences have become more fluent in immersive forms?
That’s an interesting question. Our early influences were companies like Shunt and Grid Iron. Our early work placed the physical experience and journey at the heart of the work. But I Do was a conscious shift for us – we wanted to match that physical experience to the emotional heart of the shows we were making. So, I’d say our relationship with site based storytelling has become more emotional or tied into the personal and social relationships we have with space.
In re-staging I DO, what new perspectives have emerged from returning to a story designed to be seen from multiple angles at once?
The joy of I DO is that the form of seeing stories from different perspectives is totally married with the human experiences. Each room has a beginning, middle and end in itself but your perspective on particular characters’ actions or decisions changes as you make your way through all of the rooms and understand the reasons behind them. It’s a real exercise in looking at how we make decisions or take action as affected by others.
We’ve worked with Chloë to heighten this for specific characters this time round – particularly the groom and father of the bride. There is a pregnancy storyline that has become sharper and gives us more insight into the character involved. It’s been brilliant to have an opportunity to push these narratives further.
How do you maintain emotional intimacy when your work asks audiences to navigate complex, multi-room environments?
Being so close to the characters as they are in such intimate moments brings audiences in, then it’s the cast maintaining the truth of the moment and allowing the audience to feel like it’s happening right in front of their eyes. The fly on the wall nature of the show creates such a freedom for the audience to relax and feel at ease. We notice that as they progress from room to room they relax more and more. Every character is in such a dramatic moment that it allows audiences to quickly empathise. The other joy of this show is that the form – figuring out how it’s all pieced together is as much part of the enjoyment.
What throughline connects early pieces like I DO to recent experiments such as Skin Hunger and User Not Found?
The throughine is human experience connected to the physical worlds we inhabit. They all play with how we behave in public vs private spaces and how they can collide. I DO uncovers a lot of mini dramas in a plush, comfortable environment – but a space that we pay quite a lot to stay in for specific occasions. We really play with how each room gives us a lot of clues about the emotional state of each character – the mother of the bride’s room is hyper organised and very cold despite her being very hot. The best man’s room is chaos.
With User Not Found we were looking at how so many of us exist in private online worlds in public spaces like cafes. We were interested in how our devices now constantly impact our emotions – if you found out that your partner had died through a text message in a café would you reach out to the stranger next to you to ask for help? Or if the stranger next to you saw you crying would they reach out to you?
Skin Hunger was a fascinating piece to make and perform. It took all of these ideas but put the audience in role one-on-one with an audience member. We were really looking at how the fear of touching people and being around others had impacted us all during the pandemic; and also exploring live storytelling at a time when that was not allowed. It was a really fascinating experience – much more visceral and intimate than any other piece of work – there was no audience really, more a series of exchanges.
Every production we make go through a process of deciding how an audience should experience / encounter the work and that forms a huge part of the dramaturgy – that’s central to all our work.
As immersive theatre continues to expand commercially and technologically, where do you feel Dante or Die’s ethos most sharply diverges from the wider field?
I think it’s placing the human and emotional experience at the heart of the work. The reason we love telling stories in an ‘immersive’ way is about heightening the emotional and intellectual engagement with the work. I’m always really interested to see other work in this area because there is such potential to capture peoples imaginations in new ways – and I think the physical proximity to audiences, and being immersed in a space gives us an experience that TV and film still can’t do. So that’s at the heart of it for us.
Tues 20 January – Sun 8 February 2026
Malmaison London, 18-21 Charterhouse Square, London, EC1M 6AH
Wed 11– Sat 14 February 2026
Malmaison Reading, 18-20 Station Road, Reading, RG1 1JX
Wed 18 – Sun 22 February 2026
Malmaison Deansgate, 23 Princess Street, Manchester, M2 4ER