South African VR play takes SF to Emmys

As actors slip into character, they aim to convince audiences of something real rather than manufactured. Uncanny Alley: A New Day pushes this challenge into a virtual world, where viewers become part of a live digital act. The South African-US production has received a 2026 Primetime Emmy nomination in the Outstanding Emerging Media Program category.

The story takes place inside Virtual Reality Chat (VRChat), a social VR platform where users interact through digital avatars in shared environments. Cape Town immersive studio Virtual Worlds Company collaborated with Ferryman Collective, a non-profit VR theatre company in Los Angeles, on the production. Uncanny Alley: A New Day was nominated alongside Blumhouse Enhanced Cinema and The World of Fallout at the 2026 awards.

The live play is set in the cyberpunk universe of Uncanny Alley, where two actors move between 15 characters in real time for four audience members. Participants take on the roles of detainees attempting to escape a corporation that plans to erase their memories.

Cyberpunk hacker Ghost leads the group and her increasingly sentient service bot, Atom, towards freedom through a hacked portal. They must evade Adaptive Learning Industries before the corporation can deploy experimental radio-frequency technology. The detainees then face the ultimate decision: abandon their home for a new life in the open metaverse or stay and fight to protect it.

Audience members can speak directly to the characters, respond to events and influence how each performance unfolds. The characters are avatars worn by the actors, so each digital body moves as the performer moves rather than through prerecorded animation.

Five teams of professional actors, drawn from Broadway, immersive theatre, television, movies and video-game performance, were trained to stage the production.

The original virtual setting was created by South African artist and worldbuilder Rick Treweek, who goes by MetaRick in the VR world. According to a YouTube video from Ferryman Collective, no two performances are the same.

“This is live theatre without a stage,” says a narrator in the video. “Gaming without winners and losers. Cinema you step inside. Uncanny Alley: A New Day is an experience you can only truly understand by living it. The question is: what choice will you make?”

Treweek created Uncanny Alley in 2020, during a strict COVID-19 lockdown in SA. With social gatherings prohibited, he built a place where people could meet up in a cyberpunk back alley of the internet. The universe’s first narrative experience, The Search for Gh0st, was selected for Venice VR Expanded in 2021 and won the Spirit of Raindance Award in 2022.

Discussions between Treweek and Ferryman Collective about a live theatrical performance inside the universe began in 2024. Rather than stage the show in the existing world, Virtual Worlds Company built a new one for the production.

Treweek constructed the city district by district in Unity. The more than 30 environments include a neon high street, park, hacker den, prison block and Adaptive Learning Industries headquarters. The production was engineered to run on standalone Meta Quest headsets despite the scale of the world.

The supported equipment includes Meta Quest 3, Quest 3S and Quest Pro, along with PC VR systems capable of accessing VRChat. The remote production model allows actors and crew members in different countries to perform together inside the same world. Selected presentations have also been livestreamed for viewers without headsets.

Ferryman founders Stephen Butchko and Deirdre V Lyons wrote and directed the production. Ferryman technical director Christopher Lane Davis, who goes by Screaming Color online, contributed original visual effects, animation, sound design and music. He also helps control the live show.

Uncanny Alley: A New Day premiered in competition at the 81st Venice International Film Festival in 2024. The production later appeared at SXSW, NewImages Festival, Raindance Immersive, FIVARS and the Avignon Theatre Festival.

The production won the Fanheart3 XR Fan Experience Award at Venice, the XR Must award for Best Interactivity/Performance, and the XR Immersive Award at the Kaohsiung Film Festival. It also received IndieCade’s Innovation and Performance award.

Public and hybrid presentations have extended the experience beyond headset users. At NoHo Cinefest, four audience members entered the live production from the cinema lobby while viewers inside the theatre watched the action on a movie screen. Between sessions, the actors showed how they performed from their homes while controlling characters inside VR.

Treweek says: “Ferryman brought something to the Alley I could not have built on my own: live performance. The most extraordinary part of this for me has been watching actors step inside characters I had drawn and lived with for years and give them a voice and a body in real time. They walk into that world night after night and make it breathe. What I brought was the universe. This nomination belongs to both halves of that, and it would not exist without either.

“My biggest struggle’s always been my conditioning that my stuff is too weird, and no one will like it, so it’s only for me. But eventually I realised it’s my weird moonlighting projects that bring me the most success.”

Treweek grew up in the small South African town of Kokstad, in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. He will be in the audience at Los Angeles’ Peacock Theatre when the Primetime Emmy winner is announced this Saturday (5 September 2026).

For South Africans interested in following in his footsteps, he recommends looking into Electric South’s labs. He says the company has done more for immersive content in Africa than anyone else.

“And remove the fear,” he says. “Whatever you break, you can build again.”

* Visit the ‘Uncanny Alley’ website here.