Traditional theatre generally works from a fixed, pre-written script: a playwright writes the text, a director and cast interpret it, and an audience sits in seats facing a stage to watch that fixed text unfold before them. A range of contemporary theatre forms deliberately break from one or more parts of this model — devised theatre builds a performance collaboratively through an ensemble's own improvisation and process, sometimes without ever settling into a single fixed script at all, while immersive theatre breaks the audience out of their seats entirely, placing them physically inside the performance space alongside the actors, sometimes even letting individual audience members' own choices shape what they personally experience.
Devised theatre builds the text from the process, not before it
In devised theatre, rather than starting from a playwright's already-completed script, a performance is built collaboratively by an ensemble of performers and a director working together, often through extended improvisation, discussion and experimentation, with the actual text and structure of the piece emerging gradually out of that collaborative process rather than being handed to the performers as a finished document from the outset. This means the writing and the rehearsing aren't cleanly separate stages the way they typically are in traditional scripted theatre — the performance's content is actively being discovered and shaped throughout the rehearsal process itself, sometimes settling into something reasonably fixed by the time of the actual performance, and sometimes deliberately staying at least partly open and responsive even once performances have begun.
Immersive theatre moves the audience from spectator to participant
Immersive theatre changes a different part of the traditional arrangement: rather than seating an audience at a fixed distance facing a stage, it places audience members physically within the same space as the performance itself, sometimes free to move between different rooms or scenes happening simultaneously, and sometimes directly addressed or interacted with by performers as part of the piece. Because different audience members can end up in different places, seeing different scenes, or having genuinely different interactions with performers, two people who attended literally the same immersive production can come away having experienced meaningfully different versions of it — a direct consequence of removing the fixed, shared vantage point traditional seated theatre otherwise guarantees every audience member equally.
What we're still unsure about
The core distinctions between traditional scripted theatre, devised theatre's collaborative process-driven creation, and immersive theatre's altered audience relationship are well documented in contemporary theatre scholarship and practice. What's more a matter of ongoing critical and artistic debate is how a devised or immersive piece should actually be preserved, revived or even properly credited once its original creative process and cast are no longer available — a traditional scripted play can be revived from its text alone by an entirely new cast and creative team decades later, but a piece whose content emerged specifically from one particular ensemble's own improvisation, or whose meaning depended on a particular audience member's own path through a physical space, resists being reproduced in quite the same straightforward way, a genuinely unresolved practical and conceptual question theatre practitioners are still actively working through.
This sits inside Contemporary Theatre Forms, one of seven topics in Drama, one of five domains in Literature, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.