#4. Immersive Experience
A memory money can't buy (£49.73 plus VAT)
You know what would be a great thing to experience? An experience.
You see them popping up everywhere in London – step inside the art of Vincent Van Gogh, navigate the Upside Down world of Stranger Things, or party with the gang from Mamma Mia! These are the kinds of memories that money simply can’t buy (tickets from £159.50).
An experience money CAN buy? The better version of this article. This week, it also comes with a BONUS Netflix movie pitch of mine.
Mine was not Mamma Mia! – thank Christ – but the Gunpowder Plot immersive theatre at London Bridge. ‘Step inside history’s most daring conspiracy,’ said the website. ‘Featuring Tom Felton as Guy Fawkes!’
As a fan of both gunpowder and plots, I was excited. It would also be fun to meet C-list superstar Tom Felton (N.B. little albino kid in Harry Potter).
However, I was dreading the threat of social interaction. The best thing about theatre - in fact possibly the only good thing about being bored to death on chairs so stiff they make your toes go numb – is that you get to sit in the dark and no one is allowed to talk to you. Immersive theatre is the worst of both worlds: you have to be social and you have to support the liberal arts.
It was a drizzly January night, sepia streetlights warming the old stones of Tower Bridge. I crept downstairs, beneath London’s heaving streets, and into the venue. Cindi Lauper was ringing out from speakers overhead – ahh, just like 1606.
Our Jacobean adventure saw us shuffle along winding corridors with vast iron doors and dusty oaken furniture, receiving breathless whispers from conspirators and booming taunts from the law. The place even smelt of 1606 London (I assume, since I’ve never been, but the London Dungeons have the same musky odour, kind of like barbecue crisps, so it must be true). We saw London as we’d never seen it before (assuming no sexcentenarians in our group).
At one point we hid from the furious Protestant guards; I was bundled into a small cupboard with a stranger from a different corporate outing. We grimaced at one another and spent the better part of three minutes desperately avoiding eye contact while the actors fooled about outside. I would rather have had the thumb screws.
It was certainly an experience, but it wasn’t quite immersive. In fairness, it was hard to get immersed when people were giggling and taunting the actors like schoolkids; it was even harder when the actors were getting visibly angry, pretending their hoarse SHUT UP! was all part of the fun.
The virtual reality headsets were rather amazing – so much so, they even made me feel a bit sick. Drifting along the Thames in Jacobean London, lit up by flames, was quite the spectacle. They must be great for adult videos, I thought.
Some of it was a bit contrived, though. At one point we escaped from a tower using a zipline over London. A zipline, really? Were there no e-bikes? Later, we floated above London in a flying boat. As for Tom Felton, he really phoned it in - I mean literally. All of his parts were pre-recorded, possibly over Zoom. I wondered how much he got paid for what was probably half a day’s work.
The experience taught me one thing though (apart from the need to buy a VR headset for the next time my wife’s out of town). Before the trip, I’d never realised how bad Catholics used to have it. They – I mean, we - were fully oppressed by the Protestants. We were imprisoned and tortured and treated like second-class citizens. Suddenly all my frustrations in life made sense: I was the victim of invisible legacy power structures leaving a cultural and genetic memory of collective trauma.
I bought a children’s book for my son. It portrayed the Catholics as fanatical extremists.
It’s just the same old divide and conquer, isn’t it? The more things change, the more they stay the same. Maybe 5/11 was a false flag used to justify bankrolling England’s waning war with Spain. I remember being taught in school how the signature on Guy Fawkes’ confession was skewwhiff.
No, something doesn’t smell right here. And it’s not barbecue crisps.