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This article was originally published in September 2023 A former theatre that dates as far back as 1937 in the centre of Camden might soon return to hosting performances after it became public that Secret Cinema has expressed interest in taking over the space to host immersive experiences. The Camden New Journal confirmed earlier this month that the current owners of the site on Arlington Road - The Rank Group, who own Mecca Bingo and Grosvenor Casino, were ‘looking into alternative options for the site’ following a slow return of visitors attributed to COVID and the cost of living crisis. The venue has been operating as a Mecca Bingo for over 60 years and was previously home to a theatre that had upwards of 2,500 seats. The site was split into two separate venues in 1961, with the bingo hall being created in the space formally used by the stall seating. The rest of the venue became an Odeon, and half of the site is still being used as a cinema today following a closure between 1993 and 1997. Secret Cinema was reportedly looking for a permanent space in London after being acquired by TodayTix in 2022 for $100 million. They would be following in the footsteps of fellow immersive theatre company Punchdrunk, who moved into a permanent venue in Woolwich back in 2019. Secret Cinema will be launching Wishmas - an immersive Christmas experience later this year in Waterloo. This is believed to be their only remaining show for 2023, so those eager to be a part of the next Secret Cinema world may be waiting a while. Camden Council will consider the company's licensing application at the end of September. Update as of January 2024: Camden Council have approved Secret Cinema's application to take over the site in Camden Town and the company appear to be gearing up to launch their first production of 2024 within the venue in the not-too-distant future. Update as of July 2024: Secret Cinema has decided not to proceed with the development of the Camden venue. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram for all the latest updates and rumours about Secret Cinema in 2024.

Following on from our five-star review of The Manikins: a work in progress, we sat down with writer/director Jack Aldisert to discuss the show’s inspiration, development, and why there will never truly be a final version of the script. Our interview with Jack Aldisert has been split into two parts. The first half is below, while the second half, which contains spoilers for the show's major plot points, will be released in the coming weeks. Keep an eye on ImmersiveRumours.com for the conclusion of our discussion. Photo: Marc Tsang This interview contains reference to several moments within The Manikins: a work in progress.   We would recommend those with tickets to attend avoid reading until after their visit. Immersive Rumours: Hi Jack. Thanks for speaking to us today. We're currently sat in Crypt where The Manikins: a work in progress is being performed, and to be honest with you, it's a disconcerting feeling to be back here after experiencing the show for ourselves. How have the last few weeks of performances been and what has the audience reaction been like? Jack Aldisert: Everyone's really loved it. It's been really nice, especially because with the way the show works you're immediately talking to them about it at the end. It’s been a relief that everyone has loved it so far, and to not have been in a close quarters situation talking to them afterwards and they're not satisfied.  In terms of reactions and what people take away from it, the show's so open to interpretation. There have been a few people who have taken away what I feel like I would take away from it, which is a sense of being totally overwhelmed by choice and possibility and having to make a decision amongst chaos. That’s the feeling I wanted to give people - total unreality and chaos and the idea of having to choose the right path forward when there are many paths and no one will tell you which one is right. You have to figure out what to do.  I think when I feel most satisfied at the end of a show is when the person feels like they don't know what's real anymore and they feel like their own reality has been fully enmeshed with the visions of reality that the show presents. IR: You've previously cited several writers of weird fiction for the inspiration behind the show. Can you tell us about how you came across this kind of work and the impact it had on the show's creation? Jack: I was reading a lot of the philosopher theorist Mark Fisher, he has mostly written political and cultural theory, but he has one book called The Weird and the Eerie. In that book, he dives deeply into the genre of weird fiction. He referenced so many different pieces of media in that book, and it was my first time hearing about weird fiction as a genre. Jeff and Ann VanderMeer have an edited volume called The Weird and in it, he references Thomas Ligotti, who I'd never heard of and calls him something like an ‘undisputed modern master of the weird’.. He's one of the handful of authors who have gotten a Penguin Classics collection of their books while they were still alive - it's a huge deal, but I'd never heard of him, and he's so obscure, no one knows who he is. He has this style of writing that is like nothing else I've ever read. It's this crazy mix of Edgar Allan Poe-style Baroque prose mixed with super modernist experimental writing and metafiction like [Jorge Luis] Borges or [Vladimir] Nabokov. He creates these stories where a character experiences a breakdown in reality and where their reality is invaded by other horrific realities - the seemingly unreal. He uses metafictional devices to make the reader feel like their own reality is being pulled into that. For example, he has this fantastic story called Notes on the Writing of Horror: a story. It’s written as an essay about how to write horror, but then it turns into a horror story, the centre of which is the writer of the essay. That inspired the title of the show as well - The Manikins: a work in progress.  As I was reading those stories, I just kept thinking that the thing he's trying to do here in a literary form of using metafiction is to reach out and pull you into it. In interactive theatre, you can actually do that. You could take some of the techniques that he uses in a literary form and actualise them, making it so that they are actually happening to the audience member.  If it's done right - a piece of immersive theatre can take the audience member's own sense of reality and make it one of those layers within the fiction. That is a success to me when the participant feels like their reality has just become one of the many layers of reality that are part of the show. Photo: Rebecca J. Windsor. IR: Can you talk us through your experience of studying at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and how The Manikins first began as part of your time there?  Jack: At the end of lockdown I was trying to choose between two Master's programmes. One was at Royal Holloway, and the other course was at Central. The course at Central is all about experimental devising, collaborative work and avant-garde stuff. It was a really, really difficult choice, but I’d had a lot of ideas about immersive and interactive theatre that I wanted to explore, so in the end that's why I chose the Central programme - I knew I would be allowed to experiment with that stuff. They encourage everybody in the last few months of the first year, to form companies on the course and then create a piece together - that's how Deadweight Theatre formed. The second year of the MFA I did was an independent project where you could really do anything you wanted, which is when I decided to do The Manikins. Really it was my MFA project, and you have to frame it as a research question, really. IR: What was the research question? Jack: Well, the thing I kept running into with immersive theatre was audience participation. In interactive work, there's always this level of disconnection because of the layer of artifice of characters being played. If you're an audience member and you're interacting with an actor who's in character, there's always a level of, for lack of a better word, embarrassment and confusion in the situation. A big part of that is that you've got a large group of people, usually other audience members, watching you interact. This factor of being perceived by a group of people is going to limit what you're comfortable doing in the interaction.  Let's say there’s a wizard, I know when I'm talking to this wizard that the actor playing them sees me as an audience member who's come to the show. I don't know who the wizard sees me as, standing here in my modern clothes with a weird name suddenly appearing in this environment. It creates this two-directional pull - do I respond as a character that I'm somehow making up on the spot right now?, or do I respond as myself, which doesn't make sense because it sort of breaks the world? That plus the factor of being watched felt like the barriers to truly immersive interaction in my mind. So my research question - which I thought was an impossible question - was about overcoming those barriers. It was about how to create a method for writing, rehearsing, and performing scene work in which one of the scene partners is inherently totally unpredictable because they're an audience member. Those were the questions I was trying to approach and The Manikins formed around answering those questions. IR: When you began to explore if you could break down those barriers, what were you drawing from to begin with, and how did that help the development of the show? Jack: There's a fantastic essay by academic and author Sophie Nield , who I believe is at Royal Holloway, that's from when Punchdrunk was first doing their masked shows. She talks about that quote-unquote identity crisis that's created in the situation I described. It's a fantastic essay. The masks that Punchdrunk use - that's one solution to that problem. If the rest of the audience is masked and you're masked, the embarrassment factor goes way down. I thought, okay, how do we create a controlled environment to study that effect? Well, just get rid of the rest of the audience entirely so it's just the one participant. Remove the being watched by an audience factor entirely. Initially, I was using sources like the Ligotti stories, which are about the breakdown of reality and the breakdown of identity as content for the experiments we did as we were devising together in the room, workshopping stuff. I took a month off from the work, and during that time I had this dream. I woke up from it with a realisation - the way that you get around the identity crisis isn't by eliminating it, it's by incorporating it. You take the identity crisis inherent in immersive and interactive theatre, and you make it the core of the dramaturgy of the piece. You make the piece about the participant experiencing that identity crisis and you build the piece around that. Before that, I’d been trying to eliminate the problems. When I had this realisation about the identity crisis, it was that when we’d been testing the early fragments of the show, I had naturally found myself talking to people about the piece. 'Here's what we're trying to do. Here's my goal with the piece. This is what we're working on. This is what I'm hoping to get out of it.' At the end of what they were trying - which were the first scenes with the doctor and the secretary - I would ask them questions about how it was going.  I realised that the extra meta layer I'd been saying to participants to frame the show had to be part of the show, and we use that as a device to heighten the audience's experience of the identity crisis, which will now be the core of the piece. That was the moment everything came together. From that point on, it just felt like a refinement process. Photo: Rebecca J. Windsor. IR: How different is the version of the show that existed when you were at Central to the version running now at Crypt? Jack: There's been three significant versions of the show. The first one I did as the culmination of the programme in May of last year - I didn't think there would be a life for the show beyond Central, but we got such encouraging feedback. I thought 'Okay, let's keep going with this'. One of the tutors from Central who saw that show in May very kindly offered us a space to do the show at Central for five participants over two days in November, alongside me teaching a workshop to that Master's program on making interactive work.  When you're more deeply into the dream space, that has been very different each time we've done the show, but it has always ended in the spotlight in one way or another. It’s so hard to take plot threads in a show like this and tie them together effectively. All of the changes have really been about how do we make the experience more exciting and trippier for the audience member in the second half of the show, and also do that in a way that makes sense dramaturgically to tie any possible narrative threads together. I worked extensively with a couple of great dramaturgs , Harley Winzenried and Audrey Regan, over the first few months of this year leading up to the Crypt run to improve the text.  IR: Do you think this version of the show is the final one, or are there still things that you would like to try and tweak as time goes on?  Jack: I’ve got two answers to that. The first answer is that it's almost the final version... We've been tweaking it a little bit even as we've been running it so far in Crypt. I think there's still room for improvements in the finale section, and also in the section that comes afterwards when we're talking to the participant about the show. The second answer is, once you get into the dream zone, anything can really happen. There are so many exciting things we could pursue, and actually several of the most important and exciting moments in the second half of the show came from improvs that we did because of an unexpected audience choice in an earlier version of the show, which I then incorporated into the text.  We had one participant, back when there was still a physical mannequin in the show, take the lab coat off the mannequin, put it on, and then enter the next scene as the doctor. That resulted in us doing three scenes in a row that were completely made up, including one of my favourite moments, which is when there were two doctors confronting each other, trying to figure out who was the real one. I was then looking for a way to incorporate that moment because I thought it was so much fun. The show can never really be 100% completed because there's always going to be the possibility that an audience member will do something so interesting that we then want to use it.  When I was first thinking about what kind of immersive theatre I would like to make, I was reading a lot of books on dramaturgy and narrative structure in media. I was looking into classical music structure and at the idea of a cadenza in a classical concerto - where the music in the concerto is written and you're playing it note for note, but then there's a blank section of two minutes or so where the soloist plays a full improvisation, which is incorporated into the non-improvised structure of the piece. I got really into the idea of 'How do you do a cadenza in an immersive theatre piece?' and that's what I'm trying to approach with the finale. Photo: Rebecca J. Windsor. Those are the most powerful and exciting moments for me as a performer - when it feels like the performers and the participants are equally together in what's happening and are equally inside the dream space that's been created.  IR: Has performing a show that plays with reality and dreams so much affected you and the other cast members as you’ve been performing it? Jack: Yeah. You totally slip into the headspace of the show. I've had moments where I'm playing myself or I'm playing the doctor, and I'm legitimately feeling like I'm in a dream. Because the last couple scenes of the show are so open to the audience member doing, trying, saying anything, some people stay really passive in that situation and some people try some crazy stuff. We had a situation the other day, where we had a participant try something really different. We were in a situation we'd never been in before, I was playing the scene, and then the show stopped and I felt very confused, very overwhelmed, and when it stopped I felt like it was still happening. I said to the other actor and the participant after the show, 'Wow, I just had the participants experience for like a good five minutes'. I was feeling what the participant must be feeling during that section of the show normally. The show, I think, has that element of a spell being cast, and there have been certain situations where the spell gets cast on the casters as well. Everybody gets pulled into this dream together, and those are the most powerful and exciting moments for me as a performer - when it feels like the performers and the participants are equally together in what's happening and are equally inside the dream space that's been created.  Photo: Marc Tsang IR: We need to ask you about the set design for the show. It's basically made up of a curtain and two sets of chairs. Did it go through several different iterations during its development before you landed on this design? Jack: We’ve tried to free it entirely from naturalism. A big part of the development process has been working with the designers and collaborators to rid the show of set pieces, props, anything that was a direct, mimetic, naturalistic representation of reality so that the participant is fully creating the whole world in their own mind as they go along with it. The possibilities are limitless when you approach it that way.  It was a hilarious process with the scenographer, Min Feng, who's an incredible designer. We started off looking at making walls and doors and an office. Each time I'd meet with her, we ended up taking something else out. This is definitely the best version of the set. It's so simple, it leaves everything else to the imagination. It's just light, darkness, and the curtain. I also think that the red curtain is very powerful as a symbol. It's great because it's in the space as a symbol of theatre, and the imagination element of theatre. It also provides the very satisfying action of parting the curtain and passing through it as a threshold - it's sort of a palate cleanser. Each time you go through it, it’s as if we have 30 different rooms that you're going into when really it's just one room. The curtain makes it feel like you're imagining a whole new space each time you pass through it. Even if we got a bunch of money all of a sudden, we would just stick with that one single red curtain hanging in the space. IR: We’re in a venue run by Parabolic Theatre. Similarly to The Manikins, Crypt hosted another immersive show last year that was born out of someone's studies - Bacchanalia by Sleepwalk Immersive. How has it been working with them on this run of the show? Jack: I can't speak highly enough of Parabolic, they're awesome. Everyone on the team is just the nicest people ever. When we did the show a year ago, Danny Romeo, who now writes on Phantom Peak, saw an early workshop version of The Manikins. He introduced me to Tom Black, who was an awesome participant and did some really fun stuff. He loved the show and ended up putting me in touch with Owen [Kingston, Artistic Director of Parabolic Theatre] in the fall. At the time, I had been extremely frustrated by trying to find a space to perform in that was affordable or to get someone to program us.  When Owen said he was interested, I was expecting maybe like a week or two at best. We talked and he ended up offering us six weeks. That was the exact opportunity that we needed. There is literally no one else in London or as far as I know, in the UK, who would have made us that offer off the strength of a script and off the strength of his colleague having seen the show. It was such a rare and brilliant opportunity, and I'm totally indebted to them. Beth Atkinson - who is part of their team - has been stage managing the show and she's been brilliant. She's made the show so much better and more efficient by working on it. IR: We mentioned in our review that a logical comparison for people to have made when the show was first announced was with Punchdrunk. In reality, the only thing the two shows really share is 1:1 interactions. Was that comparison something you thought about when writing the show? Jack: It's an interesting one. The first Punchdrunk show that I saw was The Burnt City, and we were already well into the development of The Manikins. I've read a lot about Punchdrunk and their work, and I did finally manage to see Sleep No More when I was in New York last year, but that was also well after the show had been written. When I was still an undergrad, a mentor of mine who had worked on props at Sleep No More back in the day told me about Punchdrunk and Sleep No More. I'd heard of site-specific theatre, but I had never even heard of immersive theatre until I was probably 21/22. She told me about it and the concept just blew my mind. Then lockdown hit and I couldn't see any immersive theatre, so I had a couple of years where I was just imagining what it would be like, reading about it and imagining what is the potential, what would I want to do in that form. I knew that within Punchdrunk shows they had 1:1 interactions, and I also knew that that was what I was most interested in about what I understood about Punchdrunk. But I also knew that it was a very particular style of interaction in those 1:1s. I've only personally ever been in a single 1:1, but my understanding was that there wasn't that much room for the participant to structure the narrative in those moments or talk in those moments. In my mind, in drama and in theatre, it's the verbal argumentation that is the core of it.  I was interested in trying to take what I thought were some really exciting ideas in the Punchdrunk 1:1 scenes, especially the dream-like nature of it. That was something I've always been really interested in - using theatre to recreate a dream space and a dream mentality, and I think Punchdrunk does that so well. I was interested in how could you combine that with conversational interaction, because they on their face seem to be almost clashing with each other. It would be really difficult to create a dream-like interaction if you're talking and articulating yourself heavily. But I thought maybe it might be possible. The idea of The Manikins being like a 90-minute 1:1, I totally see that as a comparison. Of course, on a technical level, and in terms of what the experience feels like, is completely different. I've seen something that Katy [Naylor of voidspace ] has said about it in an interview where she was talking about the show being like the dream-like feeling of a Punchdrunk show or Punchdrunk 1:1 but with the facilitated space for full agency. --- Part 2 of our conversation with Jack Aldisert will be released in the coming weeks on ImmersiveRumours.com . The Manikins: a work in progress runs at Parabolic Theatre's Crypt in Bethnal Green from 3rd June to 13th July 2024. Tickets are currently sold out, but you can visit themanikins.com  to find out more about the show.

Deadweight Theatre debuts an immersive show that defies categorisation. Performed for an audience of just one, The Manikins: a work in progress is an extraordinary experience for those lucky enough to attend. Immersive Rumours received a complimentary ticket to this show and as such, are disclosing this information before our review. The producers have had no input in the below and all thoughts are our own. Jack Aldisert in The Manikins: a work in progress. Photo: Rebecca J. Windsor. Scene 1. We receive an email with nothing written inside. Attached is a script describing us opening the email. "They open the attachment and begin reading. It is the first page of a play in which they are the protagonist. The stage directions describe the moment they are currently experiencing. They don't know how to feel about this." Scene 2. Weeks later, we are sat in the garden of St. Peter's Church in Bethnal Green. A man in a black turtleneck enters the courtyard and introduces himself. We follow him inside the church and descend into the basement. Two chairs are positioned in the middle of the space, facing each other. We take a seat opposite the man in the black turtleneck and ███ ████ ███████. --- Usually when reviewing an immersive show, we're very conscious of how much to reveal about the experience. Often you need to mention certain elements of what happens in order to discuss and dissect it properly. It's a delicate balance between revealing enough to get people's interest, but not so much that there are no surprises left. With The Manikins: a work in progress, which has just started its sold-out six-week run at Crypt in Bethnal Green, explaining anything that happens in the show would ruin it. Even if we were to describe it, it'd make very little sense anyway - you need to experience it first-hand for it to hold any meaning. It's a singular experience that defies categorisation and is unlike any other show we've ever attended. Serena Lehman in The Manikins: a work in progress. Photo: Marc Tsang Each performance of The Manikins: a work in progress is for a single audience member, who also serves as its protagonist. There's no hiding for those who attend the show - they're front and centre for the duration - and end up being as much a performer and collaborator in creating the experience as the two cast members (Jack Aldisert and Serena Lehman) alongside them. Knowing that you're the sole focus of the show when you're in it is a daunting prospect. The closest comparison most immersive theatregoers will have to the opportunity The Manikins: a work in progress offers are the 1:1 scenes in Punchdrunk's large-scale shows. While on the surface it's an apt comparison to make, this show is an entirely different beast. For much of its duration, it's unclear where the show ends and the real world begins - existing in the liminal space between dreams and reality. There are contradictions, improbabilities, and moments that are so confounding, your understanding of what is and isn't real anymore is destroyed. It’s a disorientating experience that has you questioning everything around you, including the words coming out of your own mouth. The choices thrust upon you hold so much weight that they're almost crippling, and it's hard to remember if the decisions you made were chosen by you or a different version of yourself. After a certain point, you're so far down the rabbit hole that it's impossible to see the light at the surface. Serena Lehman and Jack Aldisert in The Manikins: a work in progress. Photo: Marc Tsang In the days since we attended, the show has burrowed itself into our subconscious to a degree we didn't know a piece of theatre could. We'll likely still be processing it for weeks to come, and it's not something that will ever be forgotten. In the simplest possible terms, this is the best immersive show of 2024, and it may take many more years for anything else to come close to it. ★★★★★ The Manikins: a work in progress runs at Parabolic Theatre's Crypt in Bethnal Green from 3rd June to 13th July 2024. Tickets are currently sold out, but you can visit themanikins.com to find out more about the show.

As the platypus-loving town of Phantom Peak prepares to open its door for the ninth season of its ever-evolving story, we speak to Creative Director Nick Moran about the past, present and future of the open-world immersive experience. Phantom Peak's Starlit Summer. Photo: Phantom Peak Immersive Rumours: Hi Nick! Thanks for speaking with us today. Phantom Peak's new season opens in a few days time, and with it the show will have had 100 total trails since first launching. If you think back to the opening season of Phantom Peak, at the time did you envisage the show hitting a milestone like that? Nick Moran: I think when we started Phantom Peak, we had an idea of what we wanted to do. We knew where we wanted to go, we knew the overall ending of where Phantom Peak was going to get to. I've always known that from the beginning. I was very confident that the trails system - which is kind of Phantom Peak's thing - would be something people would enjoy. But how we did them and how we do the show in seasons, that was something we learned as we went along. If you'd said to me that we'd do 100 trails back then, I think I would have felt quite unwell, considering how much effort it was to get those first 16 up. Looking back now, they feel quite rudimentary. The trails are much more sophisticated now overall in terms of what they do, how people experience them, the things we use and the content involved. That first season was as much of a learning experience for us as for anyone else. IR: How has planning for Starlit Summer been going? The turnover between seasons is so short this time around you must have to start planning the next one as soon as one opens. Nick: Yeah. This is season nine now, and I would say with each season we get slightly better at planning everything in good time. We knew we had a small amount of changeover time between these two seasons so we have been more organised and I think that's really helped us. The town of Phantom Peak is mostly what it is now and while things do change, there's only so much we can do in that time - we're a temporary venue in London and we can't build a skyscraper, you know? Generally, when a season opens I already know three or four trails that I want to do next season pretty much from the word go, and then the rest emerge when the theme does. It's really just trying to work out what the theme is for the next season and how we make it into good fertile ground for stories that move the town along in a realistic way and feels different but also familiar at the same time. Phantom Peak's Festival of Innovation. Photo: Alistair Veryard IR: Phantom Peak as a town has constantly been evolving season upon season. There’s been multiple expansions and reworks of areas, on top of a string of new inventions being introduced. Why is it so important to keep introducing these changes to the show as part of each new season? Nick: The thing we've always tried to do with new additions to Phantom Peak is that they fill a gap in what we we need, as well as feel different in the way that people interact with them. For me I'm a content guy - I want to make loads of content that people are excited by. The tangibility is so important, so when we're building those machines and inventions that power the experience, it's all about making it so people will smile when they're doing it. People love the Paracryptic mirrors! They love them so much. It's one of those things you don't know at the time. We'll prototype something like that and then we're like, 'Okay, great, it's gonna be unleashed on 1000s of people. So let's see, let's hope it's everything it needs to be'. It's about building something that's robust and exciting as well. Last season the new addition was Klacky. When writing the trails and planning the seasons, we’re always thinking 'It'd be really good if...' and for a long time we really wanted a text input where you could type anything into it, which is so versatile across stories. While it may not be as big or exciting as maybe a new building or something, for us they're big and complicated and takes a lot of manpower and resources. Also, who doesn't love Microsoft Word's Clippy?! We were basically thinking 'What if we make a real Clippy, but it's a dick?'. Every season for us is a question of what can we do that will delight the audience the most with the resources we have. We're a young scrappy startup company - we're not rich - but we're always just trying to think about customer, customer, customer. Phantom Peak's Festival of Innovation. Photo: Alistair Veryard "For me, it's as fun as ever. I think I enjoy coming up with the stories as much as I ever have done. But I think it's consistently the same level of difficulty." IR: The show's first season had 16 trails, but over time you settled on 10 trails (plus a secret one for those who complete them all) being the ideal number for a season. Has it become easier to write them now that number is lower, or has the added complexity made it harder? Nick: The trails are much harder, much more difficult to write now. In season one, there was no real bar for how they should be and every single trail was a new articulation of the world's story. That was exciting enough from our perspective to keep us motivated, but now I'm always like 'Hey, I'm going to tell a story about Perigate this season. What do I want to say that's new about Perigate that I'm excited about? What do I want to say that we've not done before with Perigate?'. For me, it's as fun as ever. I think I enjoy coming up with the stories as much as I ever have done. But I think it's consistently the same level of difficulty since the summer of last year which is probably when we started to hit our stride on how we want to put together the trails. Phantom Peak's Wintermas. Photos: Alistair Veryard IR: You've also shared with us in the past that you'll write several more trails for a season than what ends up in the final show. Can you explain the process of coming up with each season's storylines? Nick: The process is actually really simple. We come up with trails for every character - probably five to eight different ideas for everyone, and then we'll whittle down to the best few. It's a process of elimination, so there's always more ideas. They don't always get written up as full trails, but they'll get quite far along, some of them. In most seasons there's a trail which doesn't work and then it's thrown out probably two weeks ahead of opening. A new trail will come in and basically replace it, because there's always just one that doesn't quite work, and I'm not having people have a bad experience. I'm a perfectionist, so for me, they wouldn't have gone into the show if they didn't work, and they weren't great. I think a couple trails each season, in my opinion, really smash it out of the park. We're always trying to one-up ourselves and write the best thing we can. IR: Which trails from Festival of Innovation were stand-outs for you? Nick: I really liked Some Body to Love - the Halloway trail that involved Jonas. Also, The Last Laugh and Sweet Disposition were my favourites, but it's also a question of personal favourites more than anything else. Oh, and The Very Best! It's great, it's fantastic and had some amazing moments in. Phantom Peak's Festival of Innovation. Photo: Alistair Veryard "Phantom Peak at its heart has a comedy bent to it. Comedy is such an important part of the world - it's got to be funny." IR: The Very Best was our favourite from last season. The title sequence and physical trading cards were such a great parody of Pokemon. You've done a string of trails that parody pop culture in previous seasons, are there any trails in Starlit Summer that do the same? Nick: Well, Phantom Peak has always been culturally literate right from the beginning. I think it's about finding something that we find exciting enough to use as a fun hook for a story. You'll be pleased to know that we're doing our first-ever sequel trail. We've never done one of those before, but we're doing a second Monstermon trail because people loved it so much. We always want it to feel like something where people are in on the joke if there are jokes. That it's exciting, that it's relevant, that it's fresh, that it's frothy and funny. Phantom Peak at its heart has a comedy bent to it. Comedy is such an important part of the world of Phantom Peak - it's got to be funny. And drawing on those things that we find funny is very, very important. Phantom Peak's Wintermas. Photo: Alistair Veryard IR: When writing new trails, how do you balance making them satisfying for new guests, but also rewarding for those who have visited Phantom Peak many times and are more clued up on the lore and backstory of the town? Nick: The most important thing is to focus on a good story. If you focus on a good story that is about a character in a situation with a motive, with stakes that you care about, with a journey that you care about, and people understand what's going on from the beginning, then it shouldn't matter whether it's your first time or your final time. The secret trail is always our opportunity to tell something which is very context-heavy. We need context for the deeper fans - that's always the way that I consider that. As for the rest of it, for example, if we do a trail on Dr. Furbish, I'm going to go out of my way to make sure we get something on Dr. Furbish early in the trail, which explains who he is in a different way to how we've done it before. We've got to make sure that someone who's visiting for the first time will have an introduction to it. For me, it's always about making sure that everyone is always reintroduced, but also, I like long-running TV shows, I like long-running things. I can't be assumed to be studying up on it all the time and having a memory of that. Just a little refresher sometimes is needed within that. As long as we make the story good, it's always compelling. With a good hook at the beginning, it's fun and exciting. It takes people on the journey and makes every step clear and accessible and digestible, then no matter who you are, it should be an exciting place to be and an exciting adventure to be on. Phantom Peak's Hallowed Peak. Photos: Alistair Veryard IR: Given you're now over 300 performances into Phantom Peak, and there are breaks between seasons where you can make changes in ways other shows are maybe less able to do, how much of your decision-making for the show is based on audience feedback? Nick: In terms of the stories, it's always what we think is best. We can't think about what people would want otherwise you end up working in a fan service-y way, and that's probably not healthy for anyone. What people want for the characters is not necessarily what's best for the stories. We're trying to do the best we can without pandering, but also staying core to our values of what we think are the right stories to tell and move the overarching grand plan of where Phantom Peak is going and what the overall story is at the same time. In terms of the experience as a whole, we're very, very customer-focused. We really, really try and make it something that answers to peoples need. For example, the closing ceremony was created because people said 'Wouldn't it be nice if the show had an ending?' And we're like, 'Okay, we'll give you a closing ceremony'. People said 'Wouldn't it be nice if there was something more puzzle-related?' so we did The Innovation Games. That aspect is for puzzle people, because although the trail may have puzzles within them, puzzles are not the focus. Phantom Peak isn't an escape room, although it has escape room elements in it. It's all about stories, exploration, discovery, adventure, characters, situations, motive, and storytelling. We're always trying to work out what we think the customers want from the feedback. Especially on the food and the drinks, we've always been listening, trying to get better and better. The evolution of the food in Phantom Peak is as much of a thing that we've cared about as anything else. People said they wanted slightly more elaborate, more fancy, Instagrammable cocktails. If that's what you want, that's what we'll give you. Video: Phantom Peak IR: There’s been talk of Phantom Peak expanding to other cities besides London in the future. Is there any news on the potential opening of a USA-based experience? Nick: We'd love to launch Phantom Peak elsewhere. We're still in the process of raising investment for it, so that's the big question. Hopefully something on that front will happen soon. We're looking at venues across the United States. I'm not going to toot our horn on this because it sounds arrogant, but we're currently by some metrics one of London's best experience now which is really exciting. We'd love to take it to other places around the world and expand the world of Phantom Peak. There's so much more that we can do with Phantom Peak - Jonas has his terrible, amazing plans for the universe. Jonas has infinite ambitions let's just say.... Phantom Peak's Festival of Innovation. Photos: Alistair Veryard IR: If you had to sum up your goal with Phantom Peak in a few words, what would it be? Nick: We're really trying to build a world that people can come to and explore, and have adventures. That's what we're trying to do with Phantom Peak, we're trying to make a true other-world experience. That's always been the goal - it's about building a world and a place that people can feel comfortable in, feel excited about, and somewhere they can feel at home and grow with over time. Phantom Peak's Starlit Summer season begins on 21st June and will run throughout the summer in Canada Water. To find out more about the show and to book tickets, visit phantompeak.com

Immersive Rumours received complimentary tickets to this experience and as such, are disclosing this information before our review. They have had no input in the below and all thoughts are our own. *This review was based on the opening season of Phantom Peak in August-September 2022. Some of the information here will be out of date.* Sitting in the shadow of the former Harmsworth Quays printworks in Canada Water is Phantom Peak, a new immersive experience from the people behind TimeRun and Sherlock Holmes: The Game Is Now. Blending elements of escape rooms, immersive theatre and text-based role playing games, Phantom Peak is a different style of immersive event, and it stands on its own within the London immersive theatre scene. It's an experience that flips a lot of immersive theatre conventions on their head - from making your phone an essential element of the experience, to creating an environment in which the pace is entirely controlled by your own actions - not the world around you. If you're a fan of escape rooms, puzzles and trying to complete storylines and quests when at immersive events, Phantom Peak is a must-do experience. We visited Phantom Peak on a weekday evening in August, just a few weeks after it first opened. Speaking to Nick Moran, one of the creators of the experience while there, he described the current state of Phantom Peak as it being in the first stage of a multi-year plan that will see the town expand, the storylines change and develop, and the time period in which it's set in progress and move forward. It will be an always growing experience than changes over time, getting bigger and better. When you first step foot into the town of Phantom Peak you're instructed by one of the towns-folk to log-on to JonAssist, the events companion website on your mobile phone. JonAssist operates like a text-based guide to the town - you'll be referring to it a lot as the website takes you through story trails and tracks your progress as you complete each trail. We were told that there's too many trails to complete in one night, but a healthy amount for those motivated to explore the town and uncover as much as possible is between 5-6 trails in an evening. Using the website is essential to your experience, so make sure you've come with a fully charged phone! As you first walk in and around the set for Phantom Peak, it's easy to be taken aback by the level of detail. Everything in the world feels like it has a storytelling purpose. From the Videomatic machines that play archive recordings of the towns history and lore when you enter specific four-digit codes, to the robotic doctor that can diagnose patients based on their symptoms, or the Jonagraph devices that allow you to communicate with those living outside the confines of Phantom Peak, every single piece of technology within the steampunk town is there to move the story trails forward. One of the first things we were prompted to do by the JonAssist was find the Town Noticeboard and try to find out which of the town residents is best to speak to about trying to get to the bottom of a recent scandal that occurred at the annual Fiesta of Friendliness party. The noticeboard was full of different posters and notices, nearly all of which had valuable information for any one of the 16+ story trails currently on offer at Phantom Peak. Without giving away where this story trail goes, it quickly develops into a story of mistaken identities and we spent the next half hour trying to get to the bottom of it, following every twist and turn along the way. One of Phantom Peaks greatest strengths is just how deep the storytelling goes. Nothing feels thrown together or there just for decoration, and basically every element of the experience - from the character interactions, to the posters and signs, to newspaper cuttings on tables and desks around town feed into the overall interconnected story of the town, which only gets more complex and engaging the more time you invest into it. Every resident we spoke to had their own views and opinions on the towns mysterious leader Jonas (either positive or negative), other residents, or their own position in the town. The place feels like a real, all be it heightened version of a town with people going about their day to day lives. --- The most radical difference between Phantom Peak and every other immersive experience currently running is how the show handles big story moments. The moment in time we as guests experience at Phantom Peak isn't the most dramatic or exciting in the towns history, it's just an average day. In typical immersive shows every character is going through their own personal storyline that unfolds over the course of the event whether you are there to witness it or not. Because of this, you could be at the bar or the toilet or just not in the right place at the right time and miss out of a key moment at a Punchdrunk or Secret Cinema show, and there's nothing you can do to stop that. At Phantom Peak, that isn't possible because all of the key moments at Phantom Peak only happen when you interact with either one of the robots in the town, or talk to one of the residents about something specific. It's an incredibly refreshing thing to experience as it removes the sense of FOMO that you otherwise get in other immersive experiences. It's impossible to miss key moments because you're the one creating and initiating them. It's storytelling on a personal level, and it makes your visit feel unique and intimate - as if you're the only one witnessing it. During our visit, we completed 8 of the story trails on offer. When you complete one, the resident who wraps up that story thanks you for your help by rewarding you with a small tarot-style card.. Each is numbered and serves as a great memento to remember the experience by. If you're a completionist, it's also a great motivator to keep doing the trails and hopefully collect all the cards across multiple visits. Speaking to the creative team behind Phantom Peak at the end of our visit, they laid out the future plans for the experience - with expansions to the set currently being developed (with hopes to have them completed by October), the experience will have different 'seasons' where the storylines all jumps forward in time and the residents of the town progress with their lives. Residents who are running for Mayor in the current version of Phantom Peak may well win the election in the next season for example, and new quests will be added along with more characters. This should give Phantom Peak an extra level of enjoyment for repeat visitors who can see what the residents of the town have gone on to do as time has passed. Conclusion Phantom Peak is an amazing experience for those who are fans of immersive theatre. It's been designed to allow guests to have an intimate, personalised experience where they are in control of the narrative and allows for a huge amount of fun to be had exploring everything the town has to offer. With future expansions to the experience planned, Phantom Peak is only going to build and improve upon an incredibly impressive start. We can't wait to revisit and uncover more of the mysteries the town has to offer. 9/10 ----- Phantom Peak is located in Canada Water, London. Tickets are available through phantompeak.com with prices starting from £34 per person.Check out our other reviews from Phantom Peak here. Thank you to the team at Phantom Peak for inviting us to experience the show.

Following our recent hands-on preview of Bridge Command, we sat down with Owen Kingston and Tom Black of Parabolic Theatre to find out more about their immersive starship simulator experience. Photo: Alex Brenner Thanks for taking the time to speak to us. We'd like to start by asking about the initial version of Bridge Command that ran at COLAB Factory in 2019/2020. Can you tell us about the experience of creating that version and what you learnt from it? Owen Kingston: I first had the idea back in 2010, and even at that point I was like "This could be colossal. We just need the resources to do it." I hadn't even started Parabolic at that point, I was experimenting with some immersive-style work, but I started Parabolic Theatre in 2016 so it was several years after that before I ever had an immersive theatre company. A couple of years into having that [Parabolic] we started to think we had the resources to maybe do a very cheap trial of the show. Bertie, who ran COLAB Factory, had space in the basement. Another show had pulled out unexpectedly, and he said "Do you just want to come and make something? Use it for R&D. If you make something and it's cool, sell some tickets for it in the autumn." Initially, we were just going to set up the computers as a tech test, then we thought "We should maybe put some walls around it..", so we put the walls around and then it was "We should make it feel a bit more like a spaceship..." and we just got carried away. That was the initial moment where I put it all together and thought "This is really cool. If only we had the money to do it bigger". We didn't know anybody at that time who might be willing to invest in something that was completely untested. Initially, we were just going to test it for a week. We put some tickets on sale for quite cheap and just sent it out to our mailing list. It was our fastest-selling show - within 72 hours, everything had gone. So then we thought, "Okay, we'll put another week on." And that sold really well. So we did those two weeks of testing, and it went so well - people really enjoyed themselves, even in a very janky piecemeal type set. We thought, "Let's just run it for as long as we can run it and test out our idea of episodic narrative when we do different shows in this world." Photo: Alex Brenner We took a couple of weeks break to fix a few things and make the set a bit more robust and add a few things that we wanted to try, and then we put a month's tickets on sale. Then we just kept adding another month, another month, another month, another month. What we found was that there was a fall-off - probably about 50% of people who came once didn't come back - either because they didn't like it or because they did like it, but the production values were pretty poor. But for the 50% or so who did come back, nearly all of them came back for every single episode that we made. We did nine episodes in the end, and basically everyone would come back for all of them. That's when we realised, "Oh, there's a business model here which works in theory. If only we can make a set that's incredible" So how did you come about securing the funding for this new version of the show? Owen: It was November 2019 - this group booked in, just people who had heard about us from friends of friends. They came along, played the show, and the next day I had an email that said "I played your show yesterday - the set is awful, but we loved the idea. We're an investment company, we would love to talk to you about investing in this and making a really high production value version." I was a little sceptical, but I emailed back and said, "Well, that sounds great, let's have a meeting." I went to their very posh offices in the City, and that's when I was like, "Oh, okay, maybe this is real." I sat down with their head guy, Sonny, for a couple of hours, and hammered out a deal. I was bowled over by their enthusiasm and readiness to be involved, not just by putting money into it, but also wanting to learn how we make this kind of work and then help shape the world of the show and all that sort of thing. We signed that deal in January 2020 - while we were still running the cheap version of the show. We ran it right the way through to the start of the pandemic, and when the pandemic happened, I thought, "Oh, that's it. This deal's going to fall apart." Sonny phoned me up one morning right after the pandemic started, and he said, "Look, don't worry about anything. Keep working on it. Keep doing everything you're doing. Eventually, this pandemic's going to be over, and people are going to want this stuff more than ever". Photo: Alex Brenner One of the common threads that runs through a lot of Parabolic's previous work is the idea that the audience has real agency to control and shape the world they are in through meaningful decisions, with the world responding to them. How do you go about integrating that into a show of this scale? Owen: It has to be built in from the ground up, and that was something that was a real challenge in the beginning - working with incredible theatre professionals who were used to working on linear narrative. So, the lighting designers, the sound designers, all the tech teams, were used to building a show that people progress through linearly, and that isn't as flexible as this. Getting that thinking into everybody's head at the beginning was a challenge because it really is a seismic shift in how you think about planning and how to make something. But if you build it in from the ground up, then actually it becomes very natural, and it becomes the natural endpoint. It's all about shifting that thinking from, "We are going to tell you a story, which is going to be fixed and will always happen the same way every time." It's changing from that to being, "We are going to tell a story together, and we're going to take what your decisions are and we're going to make them meaningful by bending the world of the show around it." How do you manage and keep track of all the decisions guests are making throughout the show? Owen: Really the main tool for that is the back-end database - which is built in Notion - that we use to track everything that the audience decides to do. So long as you can track it, and so long as you can feed back to the audience what the consequences of their decisions are, then it works. The important thing is that you have a way of managing the data and feeding back to the audience the consequences of that data. It's all very well making a decision, but if you never see the impact of it, you might as well have not made it. So we can track all that stuff at the back-end - we can make it meaningful - but unless they know that what they've done - X has produced Y - the whole exercise is pointless. So the feedback mechanism and then the method of data handling, Tom has been the pioneer for that... Tom Black: We did a show a few years ago called Crisis? What Crisis?, which was a politics simulator. That was powered by a spreadsheet that did all of that. It had the cause and effect, and it crucially gave us a way of feeding back into the room "So here's what's happened because of this." With this show, we've commissioned the building in something in Notion, which is much more impressive - it's cloud-based and it's going to have thousands of people in it. It saves not only what your crew did, but what you did. Let's say you come back with none of the same people, all the things you did on that previous mission are saved not just to the crew, but also to you. If you get mixed and matched with some people that did some other things, the Gamesmaster running the show can be like, "Okay, right, it's interesting, we've got a mixed crew - this person went off and did this before and made some enemies in this sector, and these guys have an alliance with these other guys. Let's make a little scenario where they have to maybe be in conflict with each other in an interesting way". But as Owen says, it's knocking over the domino and telling people that's why this happened. Photo: Alex Brenner And it's that level of responsiveness that really makes the entire thing fluid right? Owen: Yeah. It's the thing computer games can't do on their own. Computer games have got to have a decision tree. The developers are not going to be sitting next to somebody, editing the game on the fly for them to accommodate what they want to do, you've got your pre-baked choices. That's what I think is unique about interactive immersive theatre - the live actor, present in the room, who's got a brain. That's why it bothers me that so many immersive shows just make an actor follow a script. Why are you wasting your unique thing that nobody else has? Why not empower that actor to be able to make meaningful decisions about the world of the show? Having done a bunch of other shows before, we've been able to test these things in the small scale. That's enabled us to scale it up really. Tom runs his show, Jury Games, and some of those principles are really evident in that. We've made shows like Crisis? What Crisis? and For King and Country - we've had thousands of hours of being able to test that, being able to pivot the story around audience decisions, so we've got good at it. But I think that makes it difficult to imitate this well because there are so many pitfalls, and it's only really through doing it that you learn how to avoid those. Photo: Alex Brenner You've developed quite a detailed backstory for the shows world. Can you tell us a bit more about the world visitors to Bridge Command will enter into? Owen: What we're trying to do is deliver on the promise of shows like Star Trek, where it's not just about flying around and 'pew-pew, we're going to blow up a load of bad guys'. You are a representative of an Earth government, and you're there to try and be responsible. Initially, the show is centred around an asteroid belt 22 light-years away from Earth called the Adamas Belt. In the backstory of the world, humanity fled to a planet close to that asteroid belt when Earth's environment completely collapsed and they went to that planet to hopefully start again. They then discovered that the planet wasn't as habitable as hoped, and was stuck in this asteroid belt for a number of years, trying to figure out what to do next. Eventually, they crack a new power generation technology that allows everybody to return home to Earth and fix the environment. The current version of the show is set when Earth is being prepared, the environment has been sorted out, and humanity has taken to the stars again, and has returned to the Adamas Belt to recover some of the stuff that it left behind, only to find that a whole human civilisation has sprung up there in the preceding 40 years. So you've got a united government of the entire solar system, Earth and Mars, called the UCTCN. They've arrived in an area of space where nobody knows who they are, and nobody cares. They feel a responsibility towards humanity as a whole, so they're trying to bring these people into the fold, but a lot of them don't want to go into the fold. They're quite happy doing their own thing. There's a lot of political wrangling. We've got five or six different factions in the Adamas Bely, including a whole bunch of people who live on an old ark ship with forests and fields built into the ship so that they can grow food. There's a whole bunch of space criminals who run a gambling operation out of an old space station. There's a whole bunch of pirates who just go out and steal people's shit. There's a variety of independent miners and different factions who all know each other. The UCTCN becomes a kind of police... trying to make everybody work together for the good of humanity. By design, every visit a guest has will be different right? You won't end up repeating the same story beats if you visit for a third or fourth time. Owen: Either on the Military or the Exploration team, we can run a lot of unique missions. You could even repeat the same mission parameters in some cases, but make the actual mission feel completely different. You might be ordered to go on a routine patrol around some mining asteroids - that could be the mission, but what happens then is completely up for grabs. You might get attacked, you might encounter somebody who's got a distress call, and then you've got to get them onboard the ship and see what's wrong with them. You might find a weird anomaly in space that you then have to study. Maybe it destroys the shield generator or something. There are all kinds of different potential scenarios you can run so that the mission objectives can then be taken in all kinds of different directions. What do you hope the average audience member that comes to this would take away from it afterwards? What do you want them to leave having felt? Owen: I really like the idea of giving people the experience of genuinely feeling like the best version of themselves. You come aboard the ship and you get to be your idealised self - you get to be the hero. You get to do the heroic thing. You have scenarios thrust in front of you that give you the opportunity to step up. If you'd always imagined, "What would I do if my ship was under attack and I was Captain Picard?" You get the opportunity to test that and hopefully come away feeling ten feet tall because you've nailed it. If people have grown up watching sci-fi TV shows, we want to try and deliver on the opportunity to do the cool things that you've always wanted to do., like set jets to warp core, trigger the self-destruct, or sit in the Captain's chair and go 'Engage'. Tom: I really like the teamwork side of it, especially when people who don't know each other play. I've been to immersive shows where by the end I've hugged people, and I then realise after I've hugged them that I didn't know them until two hours before. I'd love for that to start happening. Because of how much you have to work together if you're going to thrive, it really bonds you together. Owen: The first version of the show, we had people who made friends, they'd come and they'd booked separately - they didn't know each other - they played a game together and then they were like, "I was really fun, should we book the next one together?" And they came back and now they're mates, which is lovely. That kind of thing would be really great. Photo: Alex Brenner Bridge Command begins previews on 27th March in Vauxhall. Tickets can be booked via bridgecommand.space with prices starting at £40.00.

Vegetables, a new immersive show for audiences of up to 13 people per performance is set to open at a secret location in Clerkenwell this June. Produced by Muddled Marauders, the show is set to run from 8th to 23rd June. The show's description is as follows: Clerkenwell Bio Botanics is inviting guests for a product showcase at their secret underground research centre. Dr Angela Haas has built a machine that can fix you in ways you didn’t think you could be fixed.. follow this link to be apply to be one of our lucky trialists. To attend, audience members must apply via clerkenwell-bio-botanics.co.uk The Arts Council England-funded show is directed and written by Nathan Ess and edited by Dan Wye (Seayonce). The show is inspired by the work of Julia Davis, Charlie Kaufmann and the Channel 4/Netflix series Black Mirror. Vegetables takes places at a secret location in Clerkenwell from 8th to 23rd June. Tickets are available via clerkenwell-bio-botanics.co.uk and are priced at £40 per person.

London's top immersive experience returns with another flawless season of mysteries and innovation in Canada Water. We head over the ridge to review Phantom Peak's Festival of Innovation. Immersive Rumours received complimentary tickets to this show and as such, are disclosing this information before our review. They have had no input in the below and all thoughts are our own. For London-based immersive theatre fans, it's often easy to take for granted just how good we have it. With an ever-growing list of immersive experiences on our doorstep, there's no better place in the world to experience the most innovative and groundbreaking immersive work. Nothing exemplifies this fact more than Phantom Peak - a mainstay of London's immersive scene since it first opened in 2022, that continues to be the most original and singular immersive experience in town. Photo: Alistair Veryard At this point, we're a broken record when it comes to Phantom Peak - since it first opened we've been screaming from the rooftops about how good it is with a string of five-star reviews. Their latest season - Festival of Innovation - continues to deliver everything guests have come to expect from Phantom Peak. With some of their strongest storylines yet and a host of new additions to the show's 30,000 sq foot site, it's an experience that continues to innovate and best itself, even after 18 months of constant updates. This season sees JONACO, the powerful organisation that has its fingerprints all over nearly every element of the town, introduce the Festival of Innovation - a World's Fair-style showcase of the latest and greatest inventions from Phantom Peak's townsfolks and tourists. Most of this season's new storylines involve these inventions in one way or another. For instance, the trail ’Nothing But The Truth’ revolves around ProstleBot - a robotic priest with boundless enthusiasm for spreading the gospel of the Cosmic Platypus, who has just found itself accused of murder - something you've asked to get to the bottom of by the towns resident priest, Pius. Photo: Alistair Veryard Elsewhere in Phantom Peak, there are storylines involving everything from pets that have escaped into other dimensions, sentient AI assistants, prehistoric creatures on the loose, creepy clowns, and a certain monster-based trading card game that's taken heavy influence from Pokemon. Often these storylines take inspiration from real-world pop culture. Previous season's trails have referenced everything from Scooby-Doo to Tomb Raider and Five Nights At Freddy's. We're now fast approaching 100 unique trails having been on offer since Phantom Peak first opened in 2022. While they've varied massively in subject matter over the last 18 months, the common thread that has been present throughout is their unpredictable nature. Rarely will you ever be able to accurately predict where any of the trails will lead you, and their constant twists and turns can soon turn a storyline about something as pedestrian as I.T. Support into a battle between humankind and demonic spirits. Photo: Alistair Veryard By design, Phantom Peak lets you take things entirely at your own pace - there are no big set-piece moments you can miss by being in the wrong part of the venue at the wrong time (something that is often the case with free-roaming immersive experiences like Secret Cinema or Punchdrunk's large scale shows), and the storylines are only moved forward by your actions as you interact with Phantom Peak's many townsfolk. If you want to take a break for half an hour to have some food and drink, the trail you'll have been doing is ready for you to pick up again whenever you are. For 2024, Phantom Peak's cocktail experience has been overhauled in the form of The Broken Chalise - a new actor-led experience at a set time during each performance. As part of the experience, guests need to complete a series of group tasks to the satisfaction of Leadbelly, the town's Health and Safety Officer, against the clock. With a mix of physical and mental tasks to complete, it's a fun activity for all group sizes, as well as those keen to dive a bit deeper into the ever-expanding lore of Phantom Peak. Photo: Alistair Veryard Considering the cocktails at Phantom Peak will run you anywhere from £9.50 to £11 each, and with an exclusive cocktail menu available only to those who participate in the experience, it's good value if you want to indulge in one of them anyway. For the avid Phantom Peak card collectors, there's also an exclusive trail card for those who take part in The Broken Chalice on top of the 10 regular trail cards handed out through the main storylines. Photo: Alistair Veryard The show's overarching story, which continues to develop season on season, sees some new developments also. The long-rumoured return of Phantom Peak's former Mayor Furbish is inching ever closer as they work behind the scenes to gain influence and control of the town against JONACO, while Jonas' long-term plans for the town see one of the townsfolk soon venturing into space as part of a classified, top-secret Operation. Photo: Alistair Veryard Phantom Peak's ability to continually deliver 10+ hours of new storylines every few months is nothing short of miraculous, and it's made all the more impressive by the fact that every season's trails somehow improve on the last. There isn't another immersive experience operating at the level that Phantom Peak is right now, and it's without a doubt the best experience on offer in a city that's already home to the best immersive work in the world. ★★★★★ Photos: Alistair Veryard Phantom Peak's Festival of Innovation currently runs until 12th May 2024, though a closing date for this season has yet to be confirmed. You can book via phantompeak.com

Punchdrunk have today announced their latest production, which is set to open at their Woolwich headquarters in May 2024. Titled 'Viola's Room' - this new show is described as “an intimate, sensory, labyrinthine journey guided by light and sound”. With no white masks, and no live cast, audience members of up to six people at a time will be guided barefoot through a maze-like set while wearing headphones, guided by an unseen narrator. It's based on The Moon-Slave, a short gothic mystery first written in 1901 by Barry Pain. The Moon-Slave follows a discontented Princess who sells her soul to the moon in exchange for music while at the centre of an overgrown maze in the middle of the night. Punchdrunk have previously adapted The Moon-Slave, but it was staged for an audience of just four people back in November 2000. Punchdrunk's The Burnt City - which ran in Woolwich, London. This latest version of the show has been written by Booker Prize shortlisted author Daisy Johnson (Everything Under) along Punchdrunk's artistic director Felix Barrett - who conceived, directed and designed the show, with co-direction from associate director Hector Harkness (One Night, Long Ago; The Third Day). Lighting design comes from Simon Wilkinson (Bedknobs and Broomsticks), and sound design Gareth Fry (The Encounter). Felix Barrett had this to say about the new show... When The Burnt City closed, our laboratory opened, and Woolwich became Punchdrunk’s home to experiment, play and develop – allowing us to prototype long held dreams and new ideas. Our ambition over the coming years is to open our doors as never before, offering audiences a chance to experience the evolution of these ideas from limited runs to larger-scale works. It’s with great excitement that we prepare to welcome audiences to the first project in a new era of Punchdrunk shows, Viola’s Room – an uncharted landscape – a moonlit fever dream. Viola's Room will begin previews on 14th May, and will run until 18th August in Woolwich Works. Tickets are on sale from 20th March via punchdrunk.com, priced at £28.50 per person.

Immersive newcomers Muddled Marauders will forever change how you look at carrots and parsnips with their surreal debut show, Vegetables. Immersive Rumours received complimentary tickets to this show and as such, are disclosing this information before our review. The producers have had no input in the below and all thoughts are our own. Photo: Vegetables by Muddled Marauders Clerkenwell Bio Botanics has opened the doors of its underground research centre to the public for the first time. They're hosting a product showcase of their groundbreaking biophysical work, and are looking for trialists. That's about as much information as was public about Vegetables, the debut immersive theatrical show from Muddled Marauders, until last week when it opened. Wrapped in secrecy since it was first announced in May, the producers have been tight-lipped about exactly what to expect, and for good reason. It's a show with an absolutely absurd premise that is best enjoyed with no prior knowledge of what is to come. Directed by Nathan Ess, the show has received backing from Arts Council England and is inspired by the likes of Julia Davis (creator and star of BBC's Nighty Night and Sky/HBO's Sally4Eva), Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror and writer/director Charlie Kaufman. While this is Muddled Marauders' first immersive theatrical show, they've been operating since 2016 in the underground rave scene and are best known for creating elaborate immersive parties in disused spaces. Photo: Vegetables by Muddled Marauders The show's story revolves around Dr. Angela Hass (Adie Mueller), a scientist whose recent breakthrough promises to 'fix you in ways you didn't know you could be fixed'. It's little surprise given the show's title, but it involves vegetables and in the best way possible, is absolutely ludicrous. Audiences are eased into the show first with welcome drinks provided by Dr. Hass' lab assistant Veronica (Michelle Roberston) and a peek behind the plastic curtains that are scattered throughout their underground research centre. There's dozens of carrots, onions and parsnips floating in jars all over the sprawling hallways of their laboratory, and stems of broccoli hooked up to enough wires and sensors that Hass could probably trace which field they were grown in if desired. Photo: Vegetables by Muddled Marauders Over the show's 90-minute duration, the absurdity of the story ramps up to a comical degree. A scene midway through in which all of the trialists are offered a slice of carrot to eat leads to a moment so surreal we were in danger of choking from how funny it was. Later moments touch upon more serious topics surrounding consent and sexual assault, but they're not the main focus of the show's narrative and are only alluded to briefly. While it's light on the kind of immersive elements that some audience members might expect, there are opportunities for those willing to get involved - though it doesn't lead to much more than some brief improv between the cast and audience. Set across two main rooms, those who attend will also find themselves seated for much of the show's duration. For a first outing into immersive theatre, Muddled Marauders have produced a show that's unique and different to everything else currently playing. They're a company to watch out for in the future and if you're willing to follow them into an undisclosed basement in Clerkenwell, it makes for a hell of a story to tell friends and colleagues about the following day. ★★★★ Vegetables runs until 23rd June in a secret location in Clerkenwell. To find out more and apply for tickets, visit https://www.clerkenwell-bio-botanics.co.uk

The globally acclaimed immersive theatre producer debuts a new, intimate production in their Woolwich home that has no performers, no white masks, and an audience with no shoes. Our review of Viola's Room... Immersive Rumours received a complimentary ticket to this show and as such, are disclosing this information before our review of Viola's Room. All thoughts are our own. Photo: Julian Abrams It's only been nine months since audiences were last invited inside One Cartridge Place in Woolwich to experience a Punchdrunk show. Set across two sprawling buildings at their new London home, The Burnt City dwarfed every other immersive production in the country in both scope and scale. It was a welcome return of the company's flagship white mask shows, with guests free to follow whichever of the twenty-five-plus characters they desired over three hours. In nearly every way possible, their latest show, Viola's Room, rejects the format fans had waited so long for before their return to London. Thematically, it's a show that touches on absence and loss, and it's chosen to make everything the company is best known for - white masks, large casts, looping structures - absent too. Photo: Julian Abrams Based on a gothic short story entitled The Moon Slave by Barry Pain, Viola's Room follows the story of Princess Viola, a teenage girl who finds herself drawn to the centre of a maze one evening and compulsively dances for hours on end after surrendering her free will to the Moon. Adapted by Booker Prize-shortlisted Daisy Johnson, Punchdrunk's version reframes the original story by first welcoming us into the teenage bedroom of a different Viola growing up in the early 1990s. With Massive Attack CDs on her bedside table and posters of The Smashing Pumpkins on her walls, her empty bedroom is revisited several times throughout the show, first falling into disarray and later being packed up entirely. In typical Punchdrunk fashion, there's no clear answer for why she's disappeared from her childhood home, but the clues we do get imply a fate not dissimilar to the Princesses'. Our introduction to Princess Viola is framed as part of a bedtime story. Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter and delivered via headphones, we hear of the Princess's first interactions with Hugo, the boy she later becomes engaged to, and how she pushed him into the mud while playing. We hear of the day her parents passed away, and the house was covered in black drapes to mourn their loss. We hear of how she would while away the days dancing in the hallways of the mansion. Above us, a swirl of cloud-shaped lights appears before a play tent in the corner of the room is illuminated. Photo: Julian Abrams During the pre-show briefing it's made clear that we need to always 'follow the light'—while it's an instruction for us, it was a compulsion for Viola. Crawling through the play tent, we enter Princess Viola's world. In Viola's Room, audiences are required to traverse the set without shoes or socks. Walking barefoot for the duration of the hour-long show, the feeling of ever-changing surfaces underfoot is wonderfully tactile - shag carpets soon make way for hard concrete, uneven wooden floorboards, and ankle-deep sand. Having our exposed feet be in contact with all these surfaces throughout the show not only physically connects us to the world, but evokes a feeling of vulnerability in the audience. Photo: Julian Abrams The first half of Viola's Room contains several wonderfully crafted miniatures. Lights in her mansion's windows flicker on and off, charting her movements through the building, and streetlights on the garden path leading down to the hedge maze illuminate her running to heed the Moon's call. As we progress through the story, the tiny objects and spaces we first saw in these early moments as observers become our reality, writ large before us. The most striking, an oak tree at the centre of the maze, seen first in miniature grows to the height of a house by the show's conclusion. It's little surprise that with no performers, the sound and lighting instead play a huge part in creating the foreboding atmosphere that permeates the show. While scenes in 90s Viola's bedroom are soundtracked by eery songs from the likes of Soundgarden, PJ Harvey and Massive Attack, the standout musical moment is in the show's second half as a crucifix of Jesus emerges from the darkness to O Fortuna. Helena Bonham Carter's narration is the one constant throughout Viola's Room. While it's well delivered, there's always a sense of detachment between us as listeners and the story we're being told. The absence of anyone besides the groups of six that experience the show together furthers this detachment as if we're ghosts walking through a memory. Photo: Julian Abrams While the looping narrative of Punchdrunk's show is absent from Viola's Room, there is one element that seems to repeat over and over again. In a similar way to the black hallways of The Burnt City that sat between Troy and Mycenae - totally devoid of theming - Viola's Room has numerous white corridors with little more than pieces of fabric draped at eye level. When so much of the set has been crafted with painstaking attention to detail, these corridors seem to do nothing but move audiences to another area without doing anything to build out the world further. Viola's Room isn't the first time Punchdrunk have tackled The Moon Slave. In 2000, when the company was still in its infancy, it staged a version for an audience of four people over four nights. Just like Viola's Room, the show had a reliance on darkness and selective lighting, a pre-recorded soundscape delivered via headphones and next to no cast. The success of that show left a lasting impression on Punchdrunk's Creative Director, Felix Barrett, who described it as "the most pure, distilled version of a Punchdrunk show". It's little wonder that 24 years later, they've decided to revisit the idea for a much wider audience to experience for the first time. While it likely won't develop the same devoted following that its large-scale shows have, Punchdrunk has delivered a show that lives up to its usual high standard. While we'd recommend familiarising yourself with the source material first to get the most out of it, Viola's Room is an experience people should dive into (bare) feet first. ★★★★ Viola's Room will run until 18th August at One Cartridge Place in Woolwich. Tickets are on sale via punchdrunk.com, priced from £28.50 per person. To keep up to date on the latest immersive experiences in London, follow us on Instagram.

With A Most Mechanical Murder returning for one night only this June at Phantom Peak, we interrogate Moonstone Murder Mysteries Creative Director Sam Emmerson on how to craft the perfect immersive murder mystery event. Immersive Rumours: Hi Sam. Thanks for sitting down with us today. Do you mind letting us know how long Moonstone Murder Mysteries has been running and how many shows you've launched since it first started? Sam Emmerson: It was Halloween 2017 when we first launched in London and the Southeast, but there's a Moonstone Theatre company in the South West of England that's been going for 15 years now. I was with them for a couple of years before starting it up here. Moonstone Theatre Company very much comes from a dining experience background, and it's in the last few years that we've moved more into the immersive experience game. I actually lost track of it at one point, but we've launched around 30 shows to date. IR: How do you go about devising and scripting that many shows? Sam: Generally, either a strong coffee or a large glass of wine tends to help. One of the things that's quite interesting about how we work - although we do the big immersive experiences like we've got coming up with A Most Mechanical Murder, and when we previously did Cyanide In The Speakeasy last year, we mainly do things for private parties and a lot of it is bespoke stuff. For about 1/3 of our shows, the clients will say 'Look, we want to do a show for our venue' or 'It's our 60th birthday' or 'We're getting married. We'd love to do a murder mystery in this sort of world, or this sort of theme' so you get a bit of a jumping-off point there. Alternatively, for the two new dining experiences that we've got for this year, we were just spitballing ideas and going, "What areas have we not touched yet that we think would be popular?" That's why we've got a show set around horse racing and the other one set like in a Renaissance Fair LARPing festival. So do you typically start at a concept or setting and work backwards? Sam: That's the way of creating shows that I find works best because ultimately - for a murder mystery in particular - although there are so many different avenues you can go down, in terms of creating motives there are only really 10 different categories that it can fall into. The order I always go in is to figure out the world that you're in, and then who would then fit into that world. Once you've got that established, then you find the link. That's why the more unique the setting, the more fun you can have. The hardest ones to write, to be honest, are the really generic ones. If it's set in an office, we've got nothing to build off. We did a live lockdown series on Zoom for 12 weeks where we played a new show every week and some of them were 'What are the strangest settings we can think of?'. One was set on the sound stage of a children's TV studio where a clown had been suffocated with a custard pie. Because of the bizarreity of it, you can be so playful with the options there. Moonstone Murder Mysteries Zoom Shows. Photos: Moonstone Murder Mysteries At the end of June you're running A Most Mechanical Murder at Phantom Peak in Canada Water. Can you give us a brief overview of the storyline for the show? Sam: The premise of A Most Mechanical Murder is that the town of Phantom Peak has gathered for the funeral of a murdered robot. However, as the last rights and the user warranty are being read, they realise someone's not there and the Health and Safety Officer of the town has also been found murdered. Fortunately, Inspector Rutherford just happened to be in town at the time, and goes 'Whilst I'm here, I've called on my detectives across the land to come into Phantom Peak to solve the case'. So the audience then set about solving both a human murder and a robot murder at the same time. With A Most Mechanical Murder, the show is set within the universe of Phantom Peak. What kind of things did you have to consider when taking over another shows space for one of your shows? Sam: Firstly, the venue is amazing. Because Phantom Peak is such a unique and big world, it gives us so many different ideas about where we could go. The challenge is making sure that anyone who'd been to Phantom Peak before believed that this had some link to that world without getting too bogged down in the huge amount of lore and information that it already has within it, while also having it so people who'd never been to Phantom Peak before weren't isolated. When we ran it previously, about 1/3 of the guests came because of Phantom Peak, 1/3 came because of us, and 1/3 had just booked because they liked the look of the show but hadn't been to one of our events or Phantom Peak before. It's a little bit of a balancing act with those sorts of shows. Our story is outside of the Phantom Peak canon, and the way we explained that was the dumbest way we could think of. When anyone who had been to Phantom Peak before asked us where the town's usual townsfolk were, we told them they'd gone off to compete as part of the Rhythmic Gymnastics team for the Jonalympics. Photo: Alistair Veryard When you take over a space, how do you make sure it's clear what is part of your world, and what's just part of the venues you've taken over? Sam: Well, the last time we did the show was a little bit like herding cats at one point because Phantom Peak's got things like Videomatic codes written everywhere - we made it explicitly clear that if we tell you it's a clue, it's a clue. If you find it randomly spray-painted in a corner of a dark room, it's not a clue. People would still do it, but I love it despite the confusion it caused because it meant people were really into the game that they were playing. When we did Cyanide In The Speakeasy at the COLAB Tavern in 2023, we had the space for three nights a week. COLAB Tavern had a lot of nooks and crannies from previous shows at the venue, and we had a whole thing where you snuck through the back door to get into the speakeasy. On the first night we did the show, someone found a cabinet filled with fake guns that we didn't know existed, and we also had people coming up to me with random little bottles of poison and I was going "Where did you find this?!" and they'd say "Oh, it was behind that locked door." Cyanide In The Speakeasy at COLAB Tavern. Photos: Moonstone Murder Mysteries This is the second time that you're mounting A Most Mechanical Murder. What were the big takeaways from when it ran previously? Sam: Fortunately, as a whole, it worked very well! There's a couple more interactive elements that we're currently looking to develop so there's always something to do. We only used the indoor space last time, this time we're opening it up to use indoor and outdoor so there's a nicer audience flow. When it's a murder mystery, everyone is 'Okay, go, go, go.' So we're trying to make it clearer to take it at your own pace. You don't have to be running around constantly the whole time because you knacker yourself out by the start of the second half! Sam Emmerson as Inspector Rutherford. Photo: Moonstone Murder Mysteries Your cast is made up of comedic improvisers. How much freedom do they have to go off-script when interacting with guests? I imagine there's a balancing act of improvising and still having to hit specific story beats. Sam: We give our team probably a much longer leash than most companies do. With A Most Mechanical Murder, the actual script is three times the size of a standard Moonstone Murders script. There are scenes that are scripted and will play out - basically the top, the middle and the end of the show where everyone's together. When they're on their own, they have certain points to hit, but they never know what's going to be asked. If an audience member wants to go down a completely random rabbit hole, our actors will go with them. If they want to go and just drill them on facts of the case, they'll also go with it, because it's their night, and it's how they want to play. It's a game within a show, but it's a show at the end of the day. If people get it wrong, that's entirely on them at the end of the night, but if that's the way you people to enjoy our show, we're more than happy to go with them on it. My ethos with our shows is 'Did you get it? Great. Did you get it wrong? Oh well. Did you have fun?'. Moonstone Murder Mysteries run events all over the country. Have you noticed a different between how regional audiences approach the shows compared to London audiences, who might attend immersive experiences more regularly? Sam: Our audience is on the whole quite a broad church and you never quite know what you're going to get. I find London audiences - and I mean this in a good way - they make you work a bit harder sometimes. Whereas sometimes when you go to a place that doesn't have as much available, it's got a different atmosphere to it. I think the great thing with London audiences, especially when you're surrounded with immersive theater fans, is that they will stress test what you've got in every which way. You get a different satisfaction from knowing that things truly do work under that stress test. Murder mysteries seem to have an enduring popularity through all kinds of media. What about them do you think has allowed them to remain so popular and for Moonstone Murder Mysteries to do so well? Sam: One is the curiosity for the morbid in all of us, I think. Because something like murder is so abhorrent, none of us could ever imagine doing it. It becomes almost fantasy, in a sense. That's why our shows are lighthearted - you'd never set a murder mystery experience in a modern-day setting where someone's been in a gang fight or someone's been stabbed. But if you set it on a train in the 1930s and everyone's wearing outfits and doing silly accents and having it off at the back of the train, then that's all kosher - that's good to go. On a lighter level, I think especially the British, we're just very nosy people. So when someone goes 'This has happened, I'm not going to tell you the answer to it.' It's that curiosity of 'I've got to know now', and an actual murder mystery most of the time is just fun. When someone admits to a murder in real life, everyone is appalled. It's a very sombre moment. When someone admits to a murder at the end of a murder mystery event, generally someone will shout 'Hang him!'. You get what I mean? There's a very big difference between reality and fiction. A Most Mechanical Murder runs at Phantom Peak in Canada Water on Thursday 27th June 2024. Tickets start at £36.50 and can be purchased here. Thanks to Sam Emmerson for taking the time to speak with us.