Interview: Simone French on TomYumSim's Trainwreck

Photo: TomYumSim/Croydonites

Back in 2024, the immersive industry was dragged over the coals when a short-lived immersive experience based on Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory opened in Glasgow and was met with widespread ridicule. Years earlier, the disastrous Fyre Festival prompted a similar reaction, spawning countless memes and several documentaries recounting how it went up in flames.

These infamous failures serve as the inspiration for TomYumSim's Trainwreck, a satirical immersive experience exploring what happens when you outsource creativity and decision-making to AI and how hyperbolic marketing can lead to experiences overpromising and underdelivering.

Ahead of the show's scheduled arrival at Shoreditch Town Hall, we spoke with one half of TomYumSim, Simone French, to discuss how viral failures inspired the show's creation, why audience participation is central to the experience, and why AI can never replace human performers.

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Immersive Rumours: Hi Simone! Thanks for speaking with us today. Can you introduce yourself and tell us about TomYumSim’s approach to making theatre?

Simone French: Absolutely. My name is Simone French. I'm one half of TomYumSim Theatre Company alongside Tom Halls, and we've been making work together for 10 years now. We're both Australian and moved over to the UK at a similar time, and we’ve been working in the UK for seven years.

Our approach to making work is very collaborative, and we have always been drawn to making interactive work. Our show A Suffocating Choking Feeling, which I perform in and Tom directed, uses social media and has the audience watching a livestream on stage that they can interact with. We made a show called Hotline, where people phoned us and got a one-on-one experience over the phone, which we tailored based on the menu the audience selected. We also made an immersive musical in Manchester where the audience drew on a long canvas, and we improvised music based on their graphic scores.

Everything we’ve done, including Trainwreck - our most recent immersive piece - has an interactive element to it. That’s always been our modus operandi. Trainwreck has had many developments, and it's been a really fun chance to make the show collaboratively with Sven Ironside, whose bold creativity, playfulness and instinctive improv skills as a creator and performer have been perfect for bringing Trainwreck to life.

Immersive Rumours: And what is it about creating immersive and interactive work that you find so appealing?

Simone French: The main reason is that I’m so excited by the liveness, the interactivity, and being able to properly connect with our audiences. I find that really exciting and a little bit risky, and it’s a chance to see first-hand what's working and what's not and be really responsive. While it’s Tom and Sim that make up the name TomYumSim, it’s our collaborators Sven Ironside, Damian Bemben, Rob Smith, Paula Varjack, Ruta Irbite, Barry Fitzgerald, mentoring from Louise Mari & our audience that make up the Yum. They’re the middle of the sandwich, and we are the bread on either side.

Immersive Rumours: For those who haven’t seen Trainwreck, how would you describe it to those who haven’t experienced it?

Simone French: It's a wild ride set onboard a train that’s attempting to take the audience to a destination of their dreams. They get to decide where the train is going and make suggestions about what might happen on the train, and we, as the facilitators of Trainwreck, have to make that come to life. 

It's inspired by the viral Willy’s Chocolate Experience that happened in Glasgow back in 2024 and how it became an absolute flop of a show. I'm fascinated by failure and how things like that could have gotten to the point where they had to close within four hours of opening! I really wanted to understand what the key elements of its failure were. The show's creator had written the show with AI and also used AI for the marketing and set design, so I became really intrigued to see if using AI throughout the creative process is becoming the norm.

In Trainwreck, the audience has to muck in to help keep the train on track as we use AI to help generate the script, music & train stops. It’s part of an attempt to see if it can be used practically or if it ends up contributing to the experience becoming a trainwreck. 

Photo: TomYumSim/Croydonites

Immersive Rumours: We hopped on board Trainwreck when it was a part of Voidspace Live last month, so we know first-hand that it’s a pretty chaotic experience, but one that’s a huge amount of fun.

Simone French: Yeah. It's a very fun and playful experience. We've had so many people say that, unlike other immersive shows where they often feel like observers, Trainwreck gives them a real role to play. There's a strong sense of collective collaboration, with everyone chipping in to keep the experience afloat. Audiences naturally want to help because they feel their participation genuinely matters.

Immersive theatre can allow you to escape in a really beautiful way, and if it's really high budget, you can get lost in the world, but sometimes a lot of effort has gone into the design, and the experience is empty. With Trainwreck, it’s a question of can we still have that magic, that sense of collective play, and that cheekiness while knowing that I’m holding a paper fan to try and cool down the train while Sven is running back and forth on the other side of a window with a cardboard cutout of a tree to show the train moving.

We're deliberately making it feel as though the audience has been thrown into a production that isn't ready yet, run by a corporate company that's only interested in ticket sales and has left the actors to fend for themselves. By keeping everything DIY and requiring the audience to help us, the show retains a playful sense of joy that undercuts the commercialisation of the immersive theatre industry.

Immersive Rumours: Am I right in thinking you’ve also got experience of working on an immersive show that didn’t go to plan and ended up being Wonka-esque? 

Simone French: Yeah. It was called Escape of the Werewolf, and it was Melbourne's first scare experience. The plan was that it would tour all around Australia. They had a great website, and it sold out before they even made the show. In the end, it closed two hours after opening on the first night. 

Basically, nothing was finished. It was meant to be like an escape room, but you’re being chased by a werewolf. None of the doors locked, and half of the costume didn’t arrive for the werewolf, so it was just a werewolf mask and a human body. Rehearsals were very loose, the set was dismal, and everyone was so underprepared. 

The experience was meant to last an hour, but it only ended up running for 20 minutes, so the audience was understandably furious. As actors, we knew things weren't right, but there was already a queue of people waiting outside for the next session. Of course, fingers were pointed at the performers, and morale among the cast was awful.

Who ends up taking the brunt when things flop? It’s the performers! That’s something we really connected with when the Willy Wonka experience happened in Glasgow. The producers and directors might be harder to find as they’re all doing logistical things out of sight, so of course, it’s the actors who have to field the complaints and the anger. 

I’ve done some other immersive experiences in my time, and sometimes the rehearsal process hasn’t been the best supported, but if it goes well, it’s often just because of the synergy between the cast, and they’re good at problem-solving on the fly.

In one show I did, there were multiple things happening at once, but there were so many one-to-ones happening that a lot of people were just standing around waiting. I ended up gathering everyone together and started doing a Simon Says dance number while catwalking around the room. It ended up being a really joyous and amazing group experience, but it wasn’t planned. I feel like sometimes you can save something as a performer, but if the audience is dissatisfied, you end up bearing the brunt in the moment.

Photo: TomYumSim/Croydonites

Immersive Rumours: It sounds like a lot of those experiences have translated into Trainwreck in various forms, and you’re working through the trauma of being in those tough situations.

Simone French: Yeah, it’s the trauma of working on those shows and wondering if those shows had a more detailed creative approach and better preparation, would they have worked? There's also the question of how many frills you actually need for something to feel magical. For me, it's the performers who create that magic. It comes from everyone sharing the same artistic vision, understanding what we're all working towards, and taking a genuine interest in the audience's experience.

Years ago, Tom and I made a show in Melbourne called SALIGIA, which was a cult-based piece about Scientology we made alongside a load of other collaborators, and that had masks that were blotted out so you couldn’t see anything. In the show, we gave people tasks like trying to find keys to open these doors with blindfolds on, and if they were willing to give themselves over and confess things, they’d get rewarded in a Scientology-like way of the more you give, the more you get.

Once we took away their sight, it became a very exciting experience. You don't always need elaborate spectacle to create impact. The question for us is: can we capture that magical feeling the first time we encountered immersive theatre and distil it into something the audience can genuinely feel.

Immersive Rumours: Every time you’ve staged Trainwreck, elements of the show change depending on the venue. How does the show change when you bring it to a new space, and what can audiences expect from the Shoreditch Town Hall version?

Simone French: That’s a really great question, because Sven & I are adapting the show again for Shoreditch Town Hall, this time using more live AI and us operating the tech. Damian Bemben, our creative technologist, is also updating the AI-generated personalised videos & software for us for each show. Plus, the destinations of the train are bespoke to each show, either decided by the audience or the AI. All of that is consistent regardless of where the show is performed, but the aesthetic shifts each time, which has been really fun.

For the show to keep evolving, we need to respond to the building and the aesthetic of it and lean into what’s already in the space. The journey we take the audience on to get into the building changes with each new venue, depending on what’s in the nearby area, and that can be either indoors or outdoors.

The aesthetic of the train and the energy of it change a lot, too. For Croydonites, it was meant to be a slick, modern Eurostar-style train, whereas for Voidspace Live, it was more of an old commuter train with no Wi-Fi and nowhere to charge your phone because we were performing in essentially an office space with fluorescent lights.

I think Shoreditch Town Hall will be our most detailed version yet. The venue has got this beautiful Victorian servants' quarters where the chancellors would have their meals prepared, and it’s a heritage-listed building, so we’re going to adapt all of the in-world material to have more of an older-world train feel with our designer Rob Smith’s help.

Immersive Rumours: The group of passengers for each show has quite a large impact on the trajectory of how things unfold. What have you learned from having different audiences throughout each iteration of the show?

Simone French: You’re right in that the audience has a huge impact. When we did the show at Croydonites Festival, one of the shows was for young people from the Croydon Youth Theatre Organisation there, and for many, it was their first time seeing immersive theatre. They were amazing; they were so on board and so open to playing. Plus, it was exciting for them to see a train world being built inside a venue they were used to rehearsing in every Saturday. A familiar space was transformed into something completely different and magical.

What's also been really fun is when audiences come in completely blind, with no knowledge of the Glasgow Willy Wonka experience, and you hear them asking, 'Is this meant to be happening?' At the Croydonites Theatre Festival, I was running around handing out snacks inspired by Willy's Chocolate Experience. I was splitting pieces of popcorn in half and giving half a kernel to one person and the other half to someone else.

You could see the confusion on people's faces as they thought, 'What's going on? She doesn't even have enough popcorn'. That's exactly what we wanted. Because they don't know whether it's a mistake or part of the show, they end up going on a much bigger journey as everything gradually reveals itself and the show becomes more immersive. If we can get to the point where audiences arrive with a completely blank slate and still have fun and fully embrace the ride, then I think we've achieved something really special.

Image: TomYumSim

Immersive Rumours: It seems like the show’s stance on AI is that it can’t ever replace human creativity. Is that a fair reading of the show’s opinion?

Simone French: My feelings on AI are that without live performance, the liveness of us as Sven and Simone, and the audience being part of the experience too, there isn’t anything there. There’s no show. AI can speak and create imagery and songs, but without our interaction with it, the magic of live performance and immersive isn’t there.

Trainwreck examines where the magic of immersive performance really comes from, and for me, it comes from the relationship between the performers and the audience. The Glasgow Willy Wonka experience might have been very different if it hadn't promised something it couldn't deliver and if the performers had been supported properly by a clear artistic vision, a thorough rehearsal process and a shared sense of purpose. 

AI is advancing at a rapid speed, and it’s getting harder to know what’s real or not, but I know what people are coming to immersive theatre for: to feel special and feel connected to something. AI can only contribute to aspects of that, but it can never become the sole creator of it.

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TomYumSim's Trainwreck runs at Shoreditch Town Hall on 10th July 2026 as part of the Summer in the Ditch festival. Tickets are priced at £12 per person and can be booked via shoreditchtownhall.com