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running for the hills (the usual response to audience
participation), with London’s up-for-anything crowd,
these happenings are the must-sees of the moment.
When tickets for You Me Bum Bum Train’s next show
went online, more than 80,000 people tried to buy
them in the first minute.
While the shy might be asking why, Kate Bond, one of
the creative directors of Bum Bum Train, as it’s known,
isn’t surprised. “There’s no other entertainment form
where people can be really imaginative,” she explains. “It
taps into the creative part of you that’s neglected. People
get sick of being themselves and
want to try something outside their
everyday lives.”
“It’s a transformative
experience: a real once-in-a-
lifetime thing,” says Dominic
Rose, who rode the Train in late
2011. “You lose all sense of time.
I found myself excited, exhilarated
and terrified about what would
be around every corner, but that
becomes very liberating because,
to a certain extent, you can do
things that you would otherwise
never get to experience. I didn’t
want it to end.”
The benign madness of Bum
Bum Train is an extreme example,
but it’s just one of the immersive
experiences out there. So far
this year, other opportunities for
open minds have ranged from
the highbrow Silent Opera (more
on this later) to the deliciously
popularist Office Party, which
turned ticket holders into staff at
a fictional company for an evening
complete with booze and revelry.
This enthusiasm for audience
participation is all part of a wider
trend. Whether it’s the red button
on your TV remote or QR codes
speckling the pages of the press,
most modern media are two-way
affairs these days. Today’s urbanites want to star in
their own movie or videogame – and these immersive
experiences allow them to do just that. It’s like virtual
reality, only it’s actually real. One such example is
Secret Cinema, set up in London five years ago and
now exported internationally, which creates whole,
explorable film environments in its venues. Visitors
to 2010’s
Lawrence of Arabia
at north London’s
Alexandra Palace, for example, found an entire Middle
Eastern souk recreated.
But it’s in the theatre where this dressing-up-box
world becomes, appropriately, the most dramatic.
Whether you want to sleep, dance, sing, experience
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blindness, fight or host your own show, London’s new
theatre scene can make your dreams come true.
“You don’t just witness a show. You take part
in it,” says club promoter-turned director Simon
Casson, whose Duckie company’s productions
have so far included a simulated shopping centre at
Christmastime; a class-warfare based, music-hall
evening complete with food fight; and their sell-out,
sleepover show,
Lullaby
. During a 50-night run of this
last one in 2011, the audience were given hot chocolate,
tucked in by nannies and spent the night asleep in
beds before sharing breakfast.
“I always want to try something
different – let’s do it on an ice
rink, let’s do it in a swimming
pool, let’s do it in bed,” says
Casson. “In the clubbing world,
the individual is at the centre of
the experience, so when we moved
into producing theatre shows,
we put the audience at the centre
of the experience too. What I
like about immersive theatre is
that if you put the audience in a
powerful position, there’s a really
live atmosphere.”
Unlike traditional theatre,
which mainly attracts a certain
crowd, Casson says the takers
for these new experiences are of
all ages and classes, marked out
more by their up-for-it attitude
than their cultural know-how.
This democratising of theatre
reflects the breakdown of its other
boundaries: the line between
audience and cast member is
blurred, just as the traditional
blueprint for sets and stages is
discarded. Much of the action
takes place in so-called “site-
specific” venues rather than
theatres. These are often hitherto
empty spaces, chosen for qualities
that help to enhance the drama.
This type of theatre can be traced back to the
warehouse productions of Punchdrunk in the early
noughties. That company’s creative director, Felix
Barrett, and his team took over old buildings and
allowed the audience to roam freely around them –
taking them way out of their comfort zones with eerie
effects and set-ups that echoed film noir. Now their
“promenade theatre” is wildly popular, with their take
on
Macbeth, Sleep No More
, having just celebrated its
first anniversary in New York. Back in Punchdrunk’s
home town, their success and mainstream support has
had an unforeseen effect: “It’s great that so many other
groups are pushing the genre in different directions,
“We put the
audience at
the centre of
the experience
”
B
elow
, Duckie’s
co-founder Amy
Lamé and
producer Simon
Casson;
right
,
HeritageArts
Company’s Tim
Wilson andMat
Burt;
bottom
right
, RETZ’s
Simon Ryninks
and Josh Nawras
and,
below left
,
Punchdrunk’s
Felix Barrett