The Butterfly Theatre Company has announced an interactive and immersive show called To Date or Not to Date? Shakespeare’s Lessons in Love to coincide with Valentine’s Day.

The show will be online and will follow Cupid on a journey with Shakespeare’s famous lovers including Romeo and Juliet, and Ophelia and Hamlet.

As an interactive production, audience members will have the opportunity to cocreate the show, drawing on their own dating experiences to help the characters untangle their love dilemmas.

Aileen Gonsalves, artistic director and company founder of Butterfly, said: “My priority is to put audience interaction, escapism and immersion at the heart of the experience with them engaging with the story and characters but also at this time, of feeling separated, with each other.

"They cocreate the environments and world with simple costumes and props and bring the settings - confetti and candles for weddings, flowers and houseplants for enchanted forests.”

The production will run for two nights only, with shows at 6pm and 8pm on Saturday 13 February and Sunday 14 February. Each show will last for approximately one hour.

People can choose whether to be interactive participants, sharing their own anecdotes and ideas on Zoom, or observers, watching the live stream via YouTube.

Butterfly Theatre has previously been known for its site-specific, responsive productions in caves, castles and forests but, like many theatres, the coronavirus pandemic has forced it to adapt and develop new methods in order to captivate audiences.

To Date or Not to Date? follows the success of Butterfly’s Interactive Immersive Online production of A Christmas Carol which took place over the Christmas period.

The theatre will also be putting on further online shows including Alice in Wonderland in March.

Over the summer, Butterfly Theatre put on an open air performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in city farms across London and as lockdown restrictions lift it hopes to be able to host a series of open air shows.

Tickets are available online at Eventbrite. Participant tickets cost £15 per household and observer tickets cost £10 per household.