The main aim for my performance was to make my audience understand the mentality of Witch hunts and experience that mob mentality for themselves. But I did not want to do this in a way that was preachy or condescending. Overall, I think I was successful.

For this performance to work, I required people to interact with myself and other audience members. Initially there was some skepticism over whether my audience would co-operate with me. I addressed this in two ways. First, I made sure that I created an environment that encouraged participation. I made sure that the audience were lit just as much as myself to communicate that they were part of the performance, not just passive observers. When the audience entered the room, I would converse with them to warm them up to the idea of interaction within the performance. Second, I would get them to gradually commit to higher levels of interaction as the performance went on. Initially, I would only ask easy questions, but would gradually ask them to become more and more involved.

The MacFarlene interview I conducted went mostly according to plan. I fed them my own description of the crime and the ‘perpetrator’ and the participant took on board all the information I gave him. By the end of the interview, he was able to present the full description of the fictional events I had fed him as though he had done all the work. However, when it came to him naming the ‘perpetrator’, he picked someone who didn’t completely fit the description. This ultimately did not affect my performance as I was able to explain the discrepancy between the description of the suspect and the actual suspect.

One part of the performance that surprised me was how eager people were to build a pyre for our ‘perpetrator’. The only prompt I gave was “Can you lot give me a hand?”, then the group instantly knew what they were supposed to be doing. Before performing, I had imagined that they might have needed a little more persuasion.

There were many aspects and examples of moral panic that I wanted to explore in this performance but couldn’t due to time constraints, such as the Dungeons & Dragons satanic panic and the Zoe Quinn mass harassment case study. I think that the concept for my show could easily be expanded into a full length show. This would have given me more time to get to know my audience, allowed more opportunities for my audience to get involved and allowed me to cover the other two topics I mentioned.