“It’s artificial.” “Of course it is.”
I have been thinking long and hard about whether I want to write this update.
There was a reason I stopped posting here. This Tumblr was created originally to help me connect with Sleep No More community in New York, and then moved on to being a place for The Drowned Man notes. None of those are relevant any more, due to the fact that I have not been in New York in a long while, never got around to flying to Shanghai, and Temple Studios closed its doors over four years ago.
It is true that since the first time I walked through the red heavy curtains of The McKittrick Hotel, immersive theatre became something I developed a keen interest in, love for, and obsession over. There have been dozens of beautiful, fantastic, inventive productions I have seen over the years, interspersed with some mediocre ones, derivative ones, and those that just did not particularly work.
*cough* Kaberoi *cough*
Sorry, I had something stuck in my throat… for a while now.
That said, this place was never about reviews; not at all. This place was about sharing love.
I guess what I am clumsily and ineffectively attempting to say is, I am only here for today, and I am here to write a love note to the first immersive show in four years I am absolutely besotted with.
Secret Cinema Presents Blade Runner.
(Actually, I should say, Secret Cinema Presents Blade Runner -The Final Cut, as it is the version they are screening, and it is also a way of distinguishing it from the previous production they did based on the same film back in 2010. But SCPBRTFC is a little bit of a mouthful.)
Secret Cinema is a company that is familiar to anyone who’s into London immersive scene. It was established over a decade ago, starting with small and pretty obscure projects, and graduating to massive not-so-secret ones, and cultivating a bit of a following along the way.
If you are completely unfamiliar with their work: their basic show structure currently includes RPG-style class systems, which has lately been incorporated into tiering of tickets as well. After you receive your “character” for the evening, you head to an inevitably secret location, where you get a chance to explore the world of a movie for approximately two hours, before being ushered into a screening that is peppered with live-action elements. The format and style of the theatrical part varies widely from project to project. It is always highly interactive, but while some of the projects are more linear, others are completely open narrative; and while some repeat the events of the movie, others show preceding events, or seem to be entirely unrelated to the plot of the film itself.
At the moment this company has four basic types of productions, where “Secret Cinema Presents” is dedicated to a film they announce in advance (those are often franchise movies, or ones with cult followings), and “Secret Cinema: Tell No One” builds a world that is actually secret, or as secret as marketing makes it. The second style has died down a bit lately, which is a real shame. They also create small scale and one-off “Secret Cinema X Presents” and “Secret Cinema X: Tell No One” projects from time to time.
There has been some criticism - as there often is with such things - that this company plunged from “artistic” to “commercial” in recent years. I would not know. I first encountered their work after moving to London, in 2014.
Since then I have seen some of their productions that were truly great, one extremely poor one, and a few that fell somewhere between “slightly bland” and “I was so bored I just got horribly drunk”.
This is actually where it gets a bit tricky.
The thing is, I have noticed that there are a whole number of variables that influence one’s opinion and enjoyment of each individual production. First of all, your experience quite obviously depends on your feelings about the film itself. It also depends on what you are expecting from your evening. If you, like myself, are into strong in-universe narrative, Miller’s Crossing would have been right up your street. If spectacle is what you’re after, Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back would’ve left you speechless. Want to party like an animal and improvise non-stop? Moulin Rouge was perfect for that. If actual screening is what you are most excited about, well, you would definitely have loved Doctor Strangelove or 28 Days Later.
Me?
Give me a story to belong to, and some characters to love, and you will have my heart.
Which is where Blade Runner comes in.
***
Set in a world of gloomy cyber-punky LA with perpetual acid rain, Blade Runner invites its audiences into an alternative year 2019. Rick Deckard is still a sprightly detective, David Holden is still in one piece, and the four renegade replicants have just arrived to Sector Four. The narrative and characters are heavily inspired not only by Ridley Scott’s film, but borrow elements from 2049, as well as Phillip K. Dick’s source novel, playing out as an alternate universe prequel, with a large cast of people and replicants imagined just for the purpose of this production.
The central narrative revolves around a brewing uprising of the underclass, but beyond that there are a multitude of subplots and stories that happen around the audience and with their participation. The underlying complexity of all those storylines interwoven with one another is simply astounding.
This is actually what sucked me into wanting to come back time and time again: every time I got involved with a character’s story, there was something about it that punched me in the gut.
You know that feeling when you follow a character’s story, and then something is revealed about them that makes you feel betrayed?
Secret Cinema’s Blade Runner has that.
You know that feeling when you are spending time with a character, doing something that is prescribed by a little sub-plot that is given you, and then you realise that your place within this character’s narrative is that of a villain, and the circumstances of that revelation leaves you heartbroken?
(You do if you ever saw The Drowned Man and followed Romola.)
And, yes, Secret Cinema’s Blade Runner has that as well. That, and so much more.
I can happily run around performing tasks given to me, following character’s leads, and generally being entirely over-active, but without the connection to bigger events of the immersive world, the experience would feel - and, indeed, did feel in some of this company’s previous projects - superficial. Here, it never does. It truly does feel like you do not just see the story, you make the story happen.
That is the very thing that I found struck such a chord with me. It’s this perfect, magical mix of non-reality and tangibility - a paradox of something feeling utterly real and actual while at the same time being a product of a perfectly crafted fantasy.
The cast is incredible. I have rarely seen a bunch of performers so flexible when it comes to bringing audience into the story. All of the little set-pieces are great, of course, and quality of acting overall is fantastic, but what I found most impressive was this cast’s ability to smoothly navigate not only themselves, but the multitude of audience members around them through this production’s narrative. Every single performer manages to juggle audience members on multiple tracks, while being completely intuitive about timings. It is clear that those performers have a lot of artistic freedom in terms of playing their moments, and they take full advantage of it.
What I also love about the Blade Runner is that its world keeps functioning even during the screening, so, should you choose to, you can just roam around, grab a dinner and a drink, while glancing at the multiple screens integrated into the set and showing Blade Runner all at the same time. I would not necessarily want to see a film as many times as I do an immersive show, so being able to just hang around, and soak up the atmosphere made me love this production even more. Not to mention that there is a little set-piece happening in town during the screening, which can have elements of interaction as well, which I find very – extra.
To me, the rest is immaterial. It is clear that the art design, and sound are great, and so are costumes. That said, I have seen Secret Cinema productions with a more impressive screening, or with a more detailed set, or with a slightly more organic integration of various character classes into the narrative, or just based on a cinematic universe I wear nostalgia goggles for. None gave me a world that had a greater emotional impact on me.
***
Here comes a moment of self-reflection.
It really took me by surprise that I am so ready to jump back in the same head-space I was in when The Drowned Man was around, because I am mostly looking back at that time wondering what the hell was I even thinking. Don’t get me wrong, I am so, so grateful to both Sleep No More and The Drowned Man communities for introducing me not only to fantastic, crazy, talented people, some of whom are still my closest friends, but also my lovely husband, who has a Tumblr as well but is not entirely confident with me linking it in this post. I am very aware that for every moment of cringey obsessiveness I also received a moment of closeness and affection. There is, however, so much shit I have been pretty much repressing since then, and I am not too keen to reprise that, thank you very much.
But then again, maybe…
Maybe it is actually completely normal for somebody who has always had such a visceral reaction to worlds jumping out of the pages of books or television screens, to every now and then lose oneself in a world constructed in a warehouse.
I keep telling myself that anyway.
The show closes on July 8th.
I am going to be back there a couple of times before that happens.
It's good. Really good. Like, Drowned Man levels of good.
Like, knock you on your ass, holy crap that was amazing, go home completely buzzing and mind-blown good.
Anyone who thinks Secret Cinema has sold out or isn't what it used to be needs to wake up and smell the Japanese lager. I've seen ten or eleven of their productions, and this is so much more accomplished and ambitious than anything they've ever done before. The earlier shows were smaller and more intimate, perhaps, but the craft and artistic ambition was nowhere near what it is now. Early audience journeys were linear, less interactive, and while the characters and worlds were recreated with loving care, it felt more like an homage than an original work, more like a cover version than a piece of art in its own right.
That said, when a company experiments and grows like Secret Cinema does it's a little unfair to compare their latest production with their early work because part of the contrast is just natural incremental improvement. Rather than play it safe, they modify the form and tinker with it each production, sometimes with mixed results, but always with a view to evolve and improve. And now when compared to the early days, Blade Runner feels like the finest example of their form of theatre so far, and it definitely qualifies as theatre, and as art.
The show isn't just a facsimile of the film but has taken the world of the book, the movie, and the sequel, and used them as a jumping off point for something new. There are thirty-odd characters, each with their own story-lines and journeys who you can follow through the night. There are nine player classes, some more similar than others, but even within the same class your journey and evening can be radically different depending on timings, interactions, and just random whims of the characters.
The level of interactivity and improvisation go well beyond anything I've seen before in immersive theatre. I feel a little unfair bringing up Punchdrunk because the two forms are so different and so beautiful in their different ways, but there's a little quote which is appropriate, I think. In the Temple Studios cast interviews, a performer was asked about what qualities she thought made a great Punchdrunk performer, and she answered:
"I think you have to love the audience. I think you have to really enjoy taking people on a journey, and really want to craft something special for them, because those performers who do that are the performers who will slyly look you in the eye and give you a wink when you’re not expecting it, or will brush past you and caress your hand, or just do those little things which aren’t set, aren’t expected, yet can completely change the course of your evening."
While the world of Blade Runner is quite a different beast, the love the performers have for the audience is the same. They want to take you on a journey too, but their touches aren't small and subtle. The performer won't wink at you or brush past. They'll co-opt you in a scheme to plant drugs as part of a sting, force you to betray characters you've befriended and empathise with, set you against other audience members, make you integral to the narrative of the show, then improvise scenes around you so that by the end of the night you feel like you've been instrumental making it all happen. And the performers won't do this to you alone, but to dozens of audience members simultaneously, juggling people on parallel quests and missions, all while hitting their set pieces and narrative points along the way without breaking a sweat.
Honestly, the only thing that does disappoint me is that more people aren't shouting about how damn good this is. One of the things I loved so much about The Drowned Man was the community who produced such beautiful writing and art inspired by the show, and I would love to see the things that Blade Runner would inspire.
If you enjoy immersive theatre then this is a must-see. The world is as beautiful and compelling and rich as Punchdrunk's finest, and it's a crime that more people aren't talking about it.
Get your asses in there and get your mind blown. Then come out back out and share the joy.
