Secret Cinema has announced their long-awaited return today, with a new production based on the 1978 film 'Grease'. The show will run at Evolution London in Battersea Park from 1st August until 7th September 2025. It's the company's first London production adapting a film since 2022's Guardians of the Galaxy in Wembley Park. The two-and-a-half-hour experience will have over 30 performers amidst giant multi-screen platforms in an immersive theatrical setting, and will be directed by Olivier Award-winning actor, Aerialist and Creative Director Matt Costain, whose previous productions for Secret Cinema include Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and Dirty Dancing. Director Matt Costain said: Secret Cinema returns bigger and better than ever, offering an experience like never before. We’ve always pioneered spectacular immersive worlds that culminated in an epic film screening. Now, in this new production of Grease, you’ll live the film from start to finish, fully absorbed in its heart. With the movie playing all around you and performances at every turn, you’ll really become part of the action. Secret Cinema Producer, Merritt Baer, said in a statement: I am thrilled that Secret Cinema is returning home to London for the first time since 2022, and what could be more electrifying than spending those summer nights with Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical. The move to Evolution London in Battersea Park marks both Secret Cinema’s most central location yet and the start of a three-year partnership that will see our world-class creative team present an iconic production each summer. Prepare to step back into your favourite movies with a dose of cinematic immersive flair that only Secret Cinema can deliver. The show is the first in a multi-year deal with Evolution London, which will also host Secret Cinema experiences in the summer of 2026 and 2027. Secret Cinema last staged an immersive version of Grease in Summer 2023 at Birmingham NEC with Grease: The Live Experience. You can read our review of that show below. Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical will run from 1st August to 7th September 2025 at Evolution London in Battersea Park. For more info and to sign up for pre-sale access, visit greasetheimmersivemoviemusical.com

With an exceptional performance from Kate Webster, The Shop for Mortals and All Fools is a profoundly affecting piece from Director Vinicius Salles Photo: James Lawson This review contains mild spoilers for the contents of The Shop For Mortals and All Fools. The Shop For Mortals and All Fools is the latest show from director Vinicius Salles. An immersive, site-specific retelling of The Bacchae by Euripides, the show is told from the perspective of Agave - the mother of Pentheus and aunt of Dionysus - as the god of wine and ecstasy returns to Thebes to claim his divine right. The Bacchae is having quite the moment within London's immersive scene right now, with Sleepwalk Immersive's retelling of the story coming to Hoxton Hall in March. While both shows are based on the same text, their approaches to adapting it differ in some key ways. Set within an antique shop in an unnamed English village, shopkeeper Agatha (Agave, played by Kate Webster) has invited a small audience of 10 people to preview the shop's latest collection. While not every item may be for sale, they all have their own story to tell, and nearly all of them lead back to their nephew Dominic's (Dionysus) return to the village. Photo: James Lawson By way of introduction, visitors are invited to explore this collection and remove the sticker alongside an item of their choosing if they think it may contain a hidden coin gifted by the Gods. With information on each item provided in a catalogue, visitors are free to browse the collection and make their own decisions. While it's an engaging beginning to the show, the combination of low light within the space and small font size makes it a challenge to make an informed decision, with most visitors settling on any available sticker they come across after a few moments. The consequences of these decisions aren't immediately clear but become important later on for one audience member. Photo: James Lawson Slowly unfolding over the next 45 minutes, Agatha recounts the tale of growing up in the brothel overlooking the village where she and The Vixens would worship Cybele, the goddess of fertility. She speaks of her sister falling pregnant and giving birth to a child that the villagers believed to be half human, half God, and her marriage to the man who would become Pastor. As the years passed, she would indulge more and more in drinking to speed up the passage of time, until one day a newspaper headline stating 'Banished God Returns' changed the trajectory of her life. Those familiar with The Bacchae will know the next part of this story. With Dominic's return heralding the village's descent into frenzy, Agatha is drawn into the woods and joins the crowds of women deep in ritualistic worship of the newly returned God. It's a choice that later leads to the death of Preston (Pentheus) at the hands of his mother, who decapitates him while believing him to be a lion. Photo: James Lawson Within the show's space, Kate Webster has a commanding presence. Given the experience both Salles and Webster have as choreographers, it's little surprise that Agatha's movement throughout the space is utterly enthralling. Constantly shifting and contorting as she traverses the room, Webster injects every scene with a wonderfully fluid sense of self. Alongside this, her performance of the show's text is exceptional, ranking up there with some of the best we've ever seen in an immersive, site-specific show. While all of Agatha's interactions with the audience are fairly light, there are select moments where she interacts directly with them. Some of the sustained eye contact between Agatha and audience members has a terrifying menace to it, and smaller interactions inviting the audience to scatter bark across the space's central table create a wonderful visual to go alongside her descent deeper into the woods outside the village. Midway through the show, the whisper of a prophecy is shared with one audience member. Photo: James Lawson By the conclusion of The Shop for Mortals and All Fools, Agatha's feelings are clear. She's been shaken by her retelling of past events, and she holds the village's men responsible. Drinking numbs the pain and represses her memories, but the objects she holds onto still have great meaning. For one audience member, their earlier choice of which artefact to claim as their own will reveal an even deeper meaning, but for the rest of us, our time in the shop is over. The Shop For Mortals and Fools is an exceptionally well-crafted piece of immersive, site-specific theatre. Tickets for the current run at Stanley Arts are sold out, but here's hoping the shop's opening hours are soon extended so more people can hear Agatha's story first-hand. ★★★★ ½ The Shop for Mortals and All Fools runs at Stanley Arts until 6th March 2025. Tickets are priced from £20.00. To find out more about the show and to book tickets, visit stanleyarts.org

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 originally written in August 2022. For more up-to-date reviews of Phantom Peak's current seasons, click here. Photo: Phantom Peak 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: 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. Photo: Phantom Peak 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! Photo: Phantom Peak 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. Photo: Phantom Peak 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. Photo: Phantom Peak 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. 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. ★★★★½ ----- 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.

London's best open-world immersive experience serves up a healthy dose of cowboys vs aliens with their latest supernatural seasonal offering, Hallowed Peak. Photo: Alistair Veryard Spooky season is finally upon us, and with it comes the third edition of Hallowed Peak - Phantom Peak's annual Halloween offering. Billed as more spooky than scary, this family-friendly immersive open-world experience has become a mainstay of London's Halloween season in recent years, and as they so often do, the team behind Phantom Peak have outdone themselves once again. There's a lot for guests to sink their fangs into this season. First and foremost, there are roughly nine hours worth of new stories spread across ten brand new trails, as well as three interactive carnival games, the ever-popular competitive sport of Platyhooks, and refreshed food and drinks offerings across the site. Additionally, two add-on experiences -The Lunar Remedy, a revamped cocktail trail, and the puzzle adventure The Haunted Hunt - add even more to the experience. It's way too much to do in just one visit to Phantom Peak, but the show has always worked best when treated as an ongoing experience that you return to again and again. For this latest iteration of Hallowed Peak, the threats that have descended upon the town are fittingly supernatural. Across the trails, there's everything from shapeshifting beachballs to vengeful cowboy spirits, candy-based demons and sentient toys to frat-boy aliens all casting a long shadow over the townsfolk of Phantom Peak. While business may booming at resident paranormal investigators Spectre & Vox, the true danger looming over the town this season comes in the form of a big red button. After being pressed by Mayor Pocket during the opening ceremony, a self-destruct sequence that threatens to destroy the town is inadvertently triggered, with a mere 4 hours left until the town is set to explode. Photo: Alistair Veryard As so often happens within Phantom Peak, what may start as just a simple request from one of the townsfolk will soon spiral off into a much more complex storyline full of twists, turns and humour. Those keen to get to the bottom of who's behind the plot to blow up the town will soon find themselves signing up for a pyramid schemes competition, subjecting themselves to a prolonged staring contest, hacking one of the town's many pieces of technology to talk to an imprisoned character and finally beating one of the townsfolk in a wand-waving battle to get the answers they need. Quite how the show's writing team can so deftly weave all of these disparate elements together into engaging and fun storylines is already impressive before you also consider that they manage to do it ten times over every few months without a drop in quality. Photo: Alistair Veryard Hallowed Peak also goes some way to pushing Phantom Peak's overarching storyline forward. In some cases, these developments are continuing storylines established back in the show's first season, which opened in Summer 2022. Don't worry if you're a newcomer though, this overarching story is still very accessible and easy to pick up within a few hours of exploration. There's direct mention of the much-teased return of former Mayor, Dr. Joy S Furbish, who has been hiding away in the vast system of mines below the town for the best part of a year now (don't believe the lies of the Opening Ceremony introductory video), and characters that have had a long absence from the show return, with Thirsty Frontier Saloon owner Copper back in Phantom Peak following a prison sentence for being part of a rebellion against the town's omnipotent leader, Jonas. While the continued success of Phantom Peak could be attributed to the ever-changing selection of storylines on offer, that's only a part of what makes this show so special. By design, Phantom Peak is driven by conversations with the townsfolk, and for those who want their immersive experiences to be full of one-on-one interaction, the show delivers in buckets. The cast, whose enthusiasm and openness to improvisation and above all else, fun, makes Phantom Peak a place people want to return to time and time again, and their attachment to the town's characters has only strengthened with each new season. Photo: Alistair Veryard While of course, the cast of Phantom Peak are all actors there to do their jobs, there is a real sense that they care about the people visiting the show, and do all they can to forge real, tangible connections with guests. Small gestures, like being welcomed back at the start of sessions by members of the cast who remember you, to the more overt displays of recognition like being referred to by name or calling back to previous conversations they've had with you, go a long way to making Phantom Peak feel like a living, breathing town with real residents. For first-time visitors, it's worth going out of your way to speak to any many of them as possible, even if they're not directly involved in the trail you're working through to begin forging your own relationships with the people that make Phantom Peak so special. Photo: Alistair Veryard October is usually a pretty busy month for immersive experiences in and around London. In stark comparison to most other Halloween-themed shows playing in the city this month, Phantom Peak is a family-friendly experience that's able to be enjoyed by visitors of all ages. As we close in on the 31st October, Phantom Peak is putting on extra sessions and extending its opening hours to get into the spirit of the season, with a late-night offering on Halloween evening. While it's by no means the most intense show themed around Halloween, it’s undoubtedly one of the most enjoyable and should be an essential visit for Halloween fans. ★★★★★ Photos: Alistair Veryard Phantom Peak - Hallowed Peak runs until 10th November in Canada Water. For more information, and to book tickets, visit phantompeak.com To read more about immersive experiences like Phantom Peak - Hallowed Peak, check out our recent immersive reviews here .

Photo: Unwired Dance Theatre Immersive Rumours: Hi Clemence! Thanks for speaking with us today. Do you mind introducing yourself and telling us a bit about our Unwired Dance Theatre? Clemence Debaig: My name is Clemence Debaig. I’m a bit of a weird mix between a dance artist, a technologist, and I also have a background as a UX designer. That leads me to making work at the intersection of dance and technology with a strong focus on immersive and participatory experiences, which is what I do with  Unwired Dance Theatre . The company was created in 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic, because I needed an umbrella for my work that was beyond me as a person. I do a lot of work with collaborators, and I wanted to celebrate that rather than having things under my own name. We work across all sorts of tech - from VR and motion capture to haptics and spatial audio - anything that goes bleep bloop will usually trigger our curiosity. A lot of the common themes in our work are around empathy, sense of control, and how those two things sometimes are related. We’re questioning how technology affects us as humans and as a way of connecting with each other. Sometimes we have this illusion that technology is everywhere and we can communicate very easily, but we tend to forget how to empathise and connect with other humans. IR: In 2020, when the company started, I imagine a lot of the work at that time was online? Clemence:  It was very remote in the work we were doing. Thankfully I have the technical skills to make work happen online - that was beyond just a Zoom performance. I’ve done quite a lot of work with telematics and having performers in different locations performing together. The first piece of work we did as Unwired as a company was called  Remote Intimacy , where I had a dancer in London and one in New York, and I made these capacitive, haptic jackets where the dancers could touch and feel each other in real time from a distance. I made a whole performance around that. That was taking place remotely for the audience, but also remotely for the performers. Remote Intimacy (2021) Photos: Unwired Dance Theatre IR: Your latest show, Where We Meet, is at The Cockpit in Marylebone later this month. Can you tell us a bit about the ideas behind that show and what audiences who are attending can expect? Clemence: Absolutely. The show started from this idea that we can never really know what's happening in someone's mind. Everyone's putting up a mask, and getting to the core of someone's inner world is very difficult. We wanted to use technology to give access to that and see if people could connect more easily when they had access to those inner thoughts.  For an audience, we like to say that we've invented telepathy. As people roam around the room, you have three dancers in the space, and the audience is invited to be part of the same space and wander around. It's very much a choose-your-own-adventure piece of work where you can decide to approach any of the three characters at any time. When you get close to them, you enter this sound bubble, and it gives you the feeling of entering their inner thoughts. As the work progresses, the dancers also have the ability to decide what they want to share through a device they're wearing on their arm. Through that, we then evolve the work to invite audiences into gentle moments of interaction, so that can be a little bit of gesture mirroring or meditation. We're not forcing anyone to dance! It's more about using your body as a human to interact, and that turns into this joyful, euphoric, communal experience. IR: Across 2024, Where We Met was staged in a few different spaces around London. How has the show changed over the past 12 months? Clemence:  I'm going to go back a little bit because the work started in 2021. The concept was born out of an event called the   Dansathon , which is a dance hackathon organised by   Sadler's Wells ,  Maison de la Danse de Lyon , and   Theatre de Liege  in Belgium. People with different backgrounds would come in, but it was really about the idea of technologists and dancers coming together. We won the Grand Prize of the event, which gave us a little grant to start. We wanted to figure out a couple of things, both what we could do from a tech point of view, but also where we wanted to go from a dramaturgy point of view, and what other stories we wanted to tell with this set-up. The original three-day prototype we had was very much to show the mechanics more than dramaturgy. We wanted to develop the dramaturgy through the exploration of the tech and what it is enabling us to do. We had several little R&Ds, then we got to present the first version at Maison de la Danse de Lyo in January 2023. That was only a two-character version of the show. We were using in-ear monitors to stream the audio from a central computer. We learnt a lot from that event and quickly realised that basically, we were never going to be able to tour the work if we carried on with that tech due to the cost of hiring equipment. In 2024, I injected a little bit of funding into this from our own savings, and we started to re-engineer the work completely. We really wanted to own as much of the tech as possible so we could work more easily in rehearsal spaces. We're now working with very cheap tech, like secondhand Android devices rather than really expensive Sennheiser in-ear monitor systems. Based on that, it really allowed us to go back into the studio and work more with the material and go much further. We started by reworking the two characters we had from a choreographic point of view, led by Livia Massarelli, our co-director and choreographer. The writing by Emma Nuttall and music by Christina Karpodini were already absolutely gorgeous, so we started from that, but choreographically we needed more time in the studio.  We had an R&D with   Rambert School of Dance , where we worked with an in-house psychologist, Kio Tomiyama, and we worked on the third character who focused a lot on perfectionism. Our third character is also male, so we needed to understand what the male perspective on perfectionism was too.  We first presented the three-character version of the show at Theatre Deli’s SHIFT+SPACE in June last year. We were particularly interested in revising our onboarding and outboarding of the work. Before that, we were onboarding people outside of the space, and it was very practical. It was very much like, ‘Do this, put this on your head.’. Now we've made it part of the work; it’s part of the audio, and there's a proper theatrical dramatic entrance with lights and all of that as you would expect. We also integrated a post-show section where we built a little decompression room where people can reflect after the show and come back to reality rather than being spat out of the space, and we're like, ‘Okay, go and take the tube again.’ Camden Fringe was the first time we had a seated observer version. So alongside the active participants, who can move around the space and get close to the dancers, the seated observers are given a tablet where they basically see a top-down view of the three dancers with circles. They can then virtually, with their fingers, move themselves around in the space. We were already very keen to explore and really just started scratching the surface of accessibility, especially from a mobility point of view. Could we offer an option for people who do not want or cannot stand in the space and move around the space for 30 minutes? After that, we did City Fringe  at Theatre Deli, Voila! Festival  at The Questors Theatre and the Digital Body Festival  that was in London as well, which is where we introduced a durational version of the work - which is an interesting one for festivals - especially in a more arts context where there might be other things happening in parallel and it's much harder to do small time slots. You need to have a lot of people coming through, so we’re experimenting with that, but we know it works.  We're always trying to figure out what's the best format/business model/conversation we can have with a potential venue or potential festival because touring very tech-enabled work is very difficult, so it’s a lot of learnings. Photo: Unwired Dance Theatre IR: I'd love to dig a little bit more into the three characters in the show. Do you mind telling us a bit about what's going on beneath the surface in all three of them, and the commonality between them? Clemence: All three characters have a big duality of what is affecting them and the journey they're on to cope with it. They’re all sharing what they're struggling with, but also they're sharing how they're coping with it. Faith is someone who is struggling with body image and has had issues with seeing herself in the mirror for years, looking at what genetics has brought in terms of the shape of her nose and the shape of her body. It's something she adores in her family, so she’d be looking at her Mum and adore her Mum’s nose but hate it on her. She has that kind of weird relationship with her body. In that journey of healing, she really takes the time to thank the body for allowing her to breathe and live to experience the world. A lot of the interactions that Faith offers to the audience are grounded meditation with a lot of visualisation exercises. There's one where you visualise yourself as a tree to retake ownership of the body, but not necessarily with an image of a body needing to have those properties. It's a way to experience the world around you and feel the air around your skin and so on. Then we have Becki… Becki is seemingly a social butterfly. Very much someone who's going to suffer from FOMO. She appears to be a party girl, but inside suffers a lot from loneliness and really struggles to connect deeply with people. To fight that, she keeps surrounding herself with a lot of people and being the life of the party but is struggling a lot with a sense of loneliness, even when surrounded by others. The interactions she offers are about reconnecting with others and then taking time to really see each other. Finally, we have Adam, who is kind of an executive machine. He comes from a family environment that expects a lot from him and for things to be done a certain way. He’s very much in this work-sleep-work-sleep pattern of trying to be the best and pushing boundaries but really is working towards letting go. There's a lot of interactions with Adam that are brushing off shoulders, shedding all that stress and anxiety, and then relearning to be present. Even though those descriptions sound dark and intense, a lot of the characters are really on a journey of taking those struggles and coping, turning them into a positive outcome. The whole experience is actually really joyful and looks at how those challenges are just the vulnerabilities that are going to help us connect and turning it into a big celebration of each other. IR: What have the audience reactions to the work been like in the previous outings of the show? I can imagine these topics being quite close to home for a lot of people. Clemence:  People are usually really touched in a joyful way, which sounds like a bit of a weird description, but people leave the space saying that they almost feel a bit hopeful for humanity and excited to then connect. We had people telling us that they were then on the tube afterwards and started talking to strangers. We had people coming back as well, wanting to do the next show straight away because they’d related so much to one of the characters; they realised they hadn't given enough attention to the others, so they wanted to then spend a bit more time there. People who have resonated a lot with one specific character on a personal level say, ‘This is literally my story,’ but also say that while the other two might not be exactly what they're going through, they still empathised with them because they might know someone who is similar. There are always those points of connection.  A lot of the time people just stay afterwards to talk to the people who are in the room, which I think is quite beautiful. There's a lot of strangers in the space, and they're like, ‘I've done this interaction with you. I've been waving my hand in front of your face, so let's have a quick chat.’ It's quite nice. Photo: Unwired Dance Theatre IR: As you mentioned, the addition of the seated observer tickets is a recent change. Would you say that the audience takeaways from the experience are the same regardless of which ticket type you get or is it going to be a different experience if you were to go from the seated observer role over the active participant role? Clemence:  As a seated observer, you have a view on everything that's happening on stage. Sometimes you can see the three dancers dancing at the same time, which you might not see once you're in the action, so it's a different experience. We've had people be a bit nervous about participating and select seated observer first, and then once they see how much fun everyone is having, they’re like, ‘Oh, I wish I was in there,’ and then come back to be an active participant.  While the active participants might feel like they’ve got people observing them because they’ve got an audience, that's not what happens in reality because, thanks to our interactive projections, you're always in the dark. As you get closer to the dancers, the light comes into the dancer. You are always kept in the dark, and you're never stepping in the spotlight. As an active participant, you never become the point of attention for people who are observing. That's a nice way of protecting that level of intimacy and making sure that no one feels like they’ve become the show. IR: That actually segues quite nicely into what I was about to ask, which is about the technology that is used in the show. Originally the lighting was very different and the audience would be more in the spotlight, right? Clemence:  Our original intention was to surround the group with the light. We have this squiggly line that's being projected onto the floor, and we wanted it to represent that level of intimacy and embracing people through the visuals. We realised that people, as soon as they noticed they were in the light, then thought they were doing something wrong. They thought they were getting too close to the dancers, and there was this feeling of, ‘Oh no, dancer, I'm not getting in the way. I'm not the show.’ So people were not getting close enough, and they were not hearing the monologues. There's a lot of happy mistakes in the work, which I love. We were in a space that was a bit too small, and our projections were not as big as usual because we didn't have the ceiling height to get an image big enough. We ended up having that line landing between the audience and the performer and suddenly it worked so much better. We realised, talking to the audience afterwards, that for them, it was very natural that it becomes this flexible boundary.  The second happy mistake, we were in a space that was too small, but originally we had the performers really quite far from each other. You had to exit one thought and then enter the other one. When we were in that space that was too small, we had to put those sound zones a little bit closer to each other with a little bit of overlap. That's the thing that everyone absolutely adores - being able to stand in the middle of two characters. Because the sound is directional, you can hear one character in one ear and another character in another ear. I can see them from a distance when I'm managing the show; people are just standing in the middle and then listening to two monologues. There's something quite magical about that. Photo: Unwired Dance Theatre IR: Do you mind telling us a bit more about how audiences are tracked as they move around the space and how that impacts what they hear? Clemence:  So basically, we’re using a very similar system to what a VR system would use. We have a virtual scene with sound zones. Imagine in a game, let's say there's a little radio playing, and then you're hearing it very faintly from a distance, but as you approach, it gets louder. We can actually track that data; we can track people in that space as every audience member is wearing a tracker on their head, and we're feeding that back into the central system and into a virtual scene that goes back out to the phones hidden into the pouches audiences wear around their neck. It's like you are virtually moving into that scene and getting closer to those positions. So we're leveraging a lot of the game engine and XR technologies. The whole product is running in Unity, and everything is kept in real time through this massive spaghetti of network messages, pretty much. As well as affecting the audio, it also affects the lighting and projection. That data is going to be grabbed as it comes through the stage management system so that if you are getting closer to a dancer, the light will be affected. The dancers are also using phones - that's the device they have on their arms - and their decision is coming back to the stage management system and being broadcast to all the other devices. If they make a change, then everyone is affected in real time. [Read more about the technology used in Where We Meet here .] IR: What do you think the main takeaway is that you would want audiences to have from the show? Clemence:  I want them to remember that connecting with others is a proactive kind of activity. We're going to connect more through vulnerabilities than through whatever superstar mask we're putting on and through pretending that we are pretty awesome. Basically the opposite of what we're doing on social media.  I want them to feel a bit hopeful about humanity and others. I think we are living in a complex, international, media-infused world at the moment, and having this little bubble of time where we can reconnect with others and have a bit of faith in reconnecting with other humans and the beauty of our differences. I know it sounds a bit cheesy when I describe it this way, but this is really what we're trying to do. Photo: Unwired Dance Theatre IR: Finally, what does the future hold for both Where We Meet, and Unwired Dance Theatre? Clemence:  We just got a bit of Arts Council funding, which has never happened before. The phase of the project is dedicated to accessibility. Due to the format of the show, there are a lot of traditional theatre guidelines that just don't apply. We want to really take the next six months as a big R&D to figure out how we do accessibility right for new immersive and XR formats.  We’re working with several accessibility consultants and also involving disabled participants in co-creation sessions where we'll be setting up the show and then doing some rapid prototyping in the space. I'm quite excited to maybe explore, I don't know, AR glasses for live captioning, which we've been talking to our Deaf consultant about the other day. Beyond just the minimum of sharing the words, how do you share the feeling of the beautiful composition, maybe through haptic vests? There's a lot of additional visuals we can imagine. That's going to be really interesting. As part of that, we also want to collect our findings and then publish a white paper at the end of the process so we can expand this to the wider community. To give you a quick example, we were trying to follow a relaxed performance format just to cater to people who might have sensorial needs. In our work, the darkness is what protects the audience, so we had put the lights a little bit up - as per traditional theatre approach for relaxed performances - and then suddenly everyone was super self-conscious and everyone hated it. It was just weird. Everyone was like, ‘I'm not going to move,’ and then no one was participating. We were like, ‘OK, we can't just take those guidelines. We're going to have to reinvent those a little bit and then see how it works’.  The Cockpit is our first milestone of research. We're going to have one performance that’ll be fully BSL interpreted. Because it's a choose-your-own-adventure, we're going to have one BSL interpreter per dancer so the participants can really switch around and then decide which character they want to engage with. This has already been really interesting because the interpreters need to sign in 360. They're in close proximity with the dancers, so suddenly the BSL best practices don’t work, and we have to go into the rehearsal space and try to figure this out together because it’s all new.  We’re also inviting participants into the space to then have a discussion with them afterwards to see if they've experienced it in a certain way and what are the new modalities we can imagine, and that will lead to a bit more prototyping. We have a partnership with the University of Kent in Chatham and then PROTO in Gateshead, who will host our upcoming workshops and sessions, so that's quite exciting. That's what we’ll be embarking on for the next few months. Photos: Unwired Dance Theatre Where We Meet runs at The Cockpit in Marylebone from 28th February to 2nd March 2025. Tickets are priced at £21.60 for active participants and £16.45 for seated observers. Accessibility information for Where We Meet is available here . To find out more, and book tickets visit thecockpit.org.uk

R Space Production's latest show invites guests to take part in a series of 'pained conundrums' against the clock in this immersive horror prequel. Photo: R Space Productions This review contains mild spoilers for the contents of DEATHCELL: Magenta. DEATHCELL: Magenta, the latest show from R Space Productions, is billed as part immersive theatre, part scare attraction and part escape room. A prequel to 2018's DEATHCELL experience, DEATHCELL: Magenta offers visitors the chance to better understand how the world of DEATHCELL came to be and how the show's titular character became the 'twisted-tinkerer' behind the rogue detention centres life-or-death challenges. Photo: R Space Productions In the original DEATHCELL, the character of Magenta existed in the shadows. The clues were there as to her existence, but she wasn't part of the show in a tangible way. In DEATHCELL: Magenta, the focus lands squarely at her feet, and she’s present through almost every second of the hour-long experience. The experience begins on a nondescript street on Fish Island, just south of Hackney Wick. Guests are first greeted by a pair of roaming actors in neon pink and yellow trucker hats named Greg and Pee-Wee. Both are huge movie buffs and engage visitors with zippy back-and-forths about their favourite films. They're eagerly awaiting a preview screening of a new horror movie, Magenta, which is playing at Rewind Rentals - a Blockbuster-esque video rental store that's somehow still operating despite the dominance of streaming services. Photo: R Space Productions After being ushered into Rewind Rentals, guests settle in to watch the Magenta short film, which is being projected onto the back wall of the room. It's got a distinct 80's B-movie vibe, with buckets of fake blood, gruesome deaths and a particularly uncomfortable scene involving barbed wire that felt like something out of SAW. Fans of the original DEATHCELL will enjoy the numerous references made to the 2018 show, but being familiar with that show certainly isn't a requirement to enjoy the experience. While the short film provides some much-needed world-building and adequately sets the scene for what's to come, the run time is far too long. Clocking in around 25 minutes, it takes up nearly half of the experience's overall duration and will likely leave guests eager to get through it so they can try out Magenta's 'pained conundrums' for themselves. After a clever reveal of the door through to the next room, guests are dropped into the world of the film, and the escape room portion of the experience begins. Photo: R Space Productions With Magenta (Steph Ricketts) looking into each room through a sheet of plexiglass, guests are tasked with solving her series of escalating puzzles against the clock. Accompanying guests in each of these rooms are a pair of 'Flys' - masked henchmen there at the behest of the Warden who oversees DEATHCELL, and has recruited the reluctant Magenta to do his bidding. Regular escape room visitors may make light work of the numerous puzzles that fill up the back half of the show, but for those with less experience, it may prove to be a frustrating time. With the Flys and Magenta watching on as guests franticly search through cupboards, shelves and drawers for items, try to decode numerical sequences and work out the combinations to various padlocks, their presence is both a blessing and a curse. If you're really struggling, the Flys will offer up wordless clues to point you in the right direction, but Magenta is more direct with their words and will call you out if you're doing a particularly bad job (At this point, you can probably work out how well we did solving these puzzles...). Any small victories you get are amplified knowing you've got an audience watching on, but it also makes the failures sting even more. In each group, one unlucky participant will find themselves separated from the rest of their team for a portion of the show, being locked away inside a small, dark space for several minutes to try and find a solution to one of the puzzles. Their escape is entirely dependent on strong teamwork, so communication is key if they want to see the light of day again. Photo: R Space Productions The strongest moments of DEATHCELL: Magenta's puzzle-solving sections come in the final act. Guests are told to put on boiler suits and crawl on their hands and knees through an extended pitch-black crawl space. Most of the show's scares are contained in this section, with multiple dark corners playing home to masked creatures that are more than happy to invade your personal space and drag you backwards by the ankles, leaving you scrambling for an escape. Luckily for them, the exit to this crawl space is locked and requires groups to potentially backtrack to find the solution. With little more than a glowstick to light the way, turning every corner is a daunting prospect that's not for the faint of heart. DEATHCELL: Magenta's final room also offers up an intense time-pressured test by way of a chained-up Fly holding the keys to freedom. With them wildly swinging an axe at anyone that gets close, it's a challenge to retrieve the necessary items from their person successfully, and it effectively ramps up the tension before you're able to make your final escape. The conclusion of the show sees Magenta emerge from behind the plexiglass for a face-to-face confrontation with DEATHCELL's Warden. One final reveal ties the ending of this show directly into 2018's show, and guests are free to leave, having played their part in securing the fate of countless future DEATHCELL prisoners. Photo: R Space Productions If you're looking for some out-of-season scares and a challenging escape room experience, DEATHCELL: Magenta goes a long way to scratching those itches. While it wasn't the scariest immersive experience we've ever attended, and the puzzles may rely on padlocks and numbers a bit too much, the show's combination of various theatrical elements creates an experience that's trying to innovate in a very crowded market. We'll be eagerly awaiting news on the next instalment in the DEATHCELL series, and in the meantime, will try and get a little better at puzzle solving... ★★★ DEATHCELL: Magenta runs from 21st February to 1st March 2025 in Hackney Wick. Tickets are priced from £30.00 for General Admission. For more info and to book, visit deathcell.co.uk

R Space Productions, the producers of upcoming immersive horror escape experience DEATHCELL: Magenta, have released an official trailer and production images ahead of the show opening next month in Hackney Wick for a limited two-week run. The show is described as a 'wild and thrilling experience, combining theatrical cinema, time-pressured puzzle solving and impossible decisions', and is the follow-up to 2018's DEATHCELL, which won Best Out Of Season Attraction at the 2019 ScareCON Awards. Built on chaos and corruption, DEATHCELL is a formidable institution of abused government power. It’s a heart-pounding prison of puzzles, punishment and paranoia. A problematic penitentiary where decisions determine fate. In this modern dystopia, inmates are treated as players in a political prison, fighting for survival and subject to pained puzzles where choice is a weapon of fate. You must select to survive. Photos: R Space Productions R Space Productions are a first-of-its-kind hybrid company, combining award-winning productions and experiential immersive workshop experiences alongside creative entertainment services, attraction design and creative, operations management, event marketing and more. Driven by a core team of just six members with more than 30 years combined experience in the live entertainment industry, and led by founder and managing director Steph Ricketts, R Space Productions is on a mission to lead the way in immersive entertainment, creating see-it-to-believe-it experiences. DEATHCELL: Magenta Trailer (via R Space Productions) Steph Ricketts, Founder & Managing Director of R Space Productions, commented: I can't wait for the world to discover what awaits from R Space Productions. Our upcoming show, DEATHCELL: MAGENTA, is set to leave a lasting impression, marking our most daring venture to date. By blending elements of cinema, immersive theatre, escape room puzzles, and the thrill of horror, we're pushing boundaries and crafting new forms of escapism with compelling storytelling. Our journey began six years ago with nothing but dedication and passion. Witnessing the team at R Space Productions dive wholeheartedly into this project fills me with immense pride, leaving myself and many excited for the future that lies ahead. Photos: R Space Productions Liam McClean, Head of Marketing & Sales at R Space Productions adds the following... This experience is like nothing you’ve seen before. We’ve created something unique, innovative and next-level scary. DEATHCELL: MAGENTA is one-of-a-kind, and I can’t wait to hear the screams of pure terror and excitement. Photos: R Space Productions Once guests have secured their tickets, they'll be invited to Rewind Rentals (a nod to 80’s nostalgia and the late Blockbuster Video) to enjoy an exclusive screening of an unreleased short film horror-flick, MAGENTA. But as the lines blur between fiction and reality, the true test lies in making it to the end of the film in one piece... are you ready to push play? Deathcell: Magenta will run from 21st February to 1st March 2025 at an undisclosed location in Hackney Wick. Tickets are on sale now, starting from £30.00. For more info and to book, visit deathcell.co.uk

The Shop for Mortals and Fools, a site-responsive and immersive production from multidisciplinary artist Vinicius Salles, is set to open its door next month at Stanley Arts in South London. Audiences will be immersed in a carefully designed world, where every corner of the shop holds a fragment of a larger story. Old relics, unique finds, hidden trinkets, and heirlooms await discovery – treasures that whisper forgotten stories and hold secrets to be unearthed. Photo: Stanley Arts/Vinicius Salles From physical performance to detailed set design, the production creates a multisensory journey that invites participants to question their perceptions of reality, memory, and the human condition. Audiences of up to 10 people per performance are invited to explore the shop's collection, in which every object has a tale to tell. One audience member may unlock a hidden mystery by participating in a game woven into the experience, with the winner getting the chance to play a special scene, reveal the mystery, and if successful, receive a gift from the gods to take home. The production reimagines The Bacchae by Euripides, weaving an original narrative that explores power, revenge, and the fragility of the human spirit. Salles’ vision invites audiences to delve into a narrative as captivating as it is deeply human, where ancient myths collide with contemporary themes. As an artist known for his interdisciplinary approach and immersive storytelling, Vinicius Salles continues to push the boundaries of theatre and performance. Drawing from a 35-year career collaborating with companies such as Punchdrunk , Gecko , and Jasmin Vardimon Company , Salles combines his expertise in physical theatre, narrative, and multimedia to create unique experiences. With The Shop for Mortals and Fools, he explores the power of environment and interactivity, crafting a performance that is as much an exploration as it is an experience. Blurring the boundaries of immersion, the experience will also feature an exhibition of artworks by artists such as Anita Wadsworth, Alberto Pavan, Leah German, and Daisy Young, with these works available for purchase. The Shop for Mortals and Fools runs at Stanley Arts in South Norwood from 14th February to 1st March 2025. Tickets are priced at £20.00, with VIP tickets available for shows on the 28th February and 1st March. To find out more and book tickets, visit stanleyarts.org

Photo: R Space Productions Immersive Rumours: Hi Steph. Thanks for sitting down with us today. Do you mind introducing yourself and telling us a bit about R Space Productions? Steph Ricketts: Yes, I’m Steph and I'm the Managing Director and Founder of R Space Productions . Back when we started R Space in 2018, we just wanted to create a space for people to come and share things they we were working on, make things together and share their skill sets. I had a project name called ‘The Space’ for a while in my head. It’s grown loads in the last couple of years, but when we started, Staines (which was the main hub for most of us) didn’t have a lot of arts or creative areas outside of places we worked at the time, such as Thorpe Park. We'd wait every year for the Halloween season to come along, but we'd get the itch for it around February time, so it was about asking, 'What if we did it all year round? What if we got to do this full-time because we're the one’s creating it?’ The goal of doing these shows [with R Space] has always been to grow people's skill sets and create a space for people to come and be in the industry while learning from us at the same time IR: We're speaking today because DEATHCELL: Magenta is opening later this month, but I'd love to talk about the previous DEATHCELL show that took place back in 2018. How did the idea for that original show come about? Steph: I’d had the idea of creating a prison-themed experience for a while. I'd become weirdly fascinated with prisons, so every time I went away on holiday or travelling, I’d go see a prison to learn about history and culture. When I went to San Francisco, I went to see Alcotraz. Add in my love for graphic novels, comics, and anime, and that’s where the story started - I wanted to tell a story about a prison that wasn’t typical and more fictional. I had snippets of what the story could be at the time, but it wasn’t cohesive. I wrote a 30-page document explaining what DEATHCELL is and what it was like to be in there. There was lore and different paths characters were going to take that would impact their future. People hear me say this all the time, but I’m such a fan of the film Fight Club. What I love about that story is that things can be in front of you the whole time, and you don’t realise. It’s the same with the SAW franchise. As a player in Jigsaw’s games, if you had just listened to the rules without overthinking it, you could have walked out alive. I was heavily inspired by that. IR: For those who didn't attend the 2018 show, can you tell us a bit about what that experience involved? Steph: The best way to describe the show is that it was an introduction or pilot into this world. It showed guests what a day is like inside this prison through the eyes of one character branded ‘Yellow.’ We don’t know their real name because when you go into DEATHCELL, you’re branded with a colour, and your identity is removed from you. Within the world of DEATHCELL, individuals either handed themselves in or were forcibly taken in by masked henchmen known as ‘The Flys.’ This choice determined their journey. Those who resisted faced a harsher induction, such as electrocution, while those who surrendered were taken to the shower room for waterboarding. (Which is still rough!) So at the start, guests were split and experienced one of these paths as they entered. We had actors who were really happy to invest in those scenes and went for it. People came out saying that the waterboarding scene was one of the hardest to watch. After you’d been inducted (as guests) you would all witness a fight between two of the inmates in DEATHCELL named ‘players’. These characters weren't just banged up in a cell somewhere, they were fighting for their lives and earning coins, or credits as we call them, to keep themselves alive. We had stooges planted in the audience, who would get picked out to be part of this fight. We wanted to make the audience feel like they were living and breathing this world, and it could be them who gets picked out next, injecting fear into people. Audiences didn’t think they were part of it, but members of the team were planted as stooges but just in their normal clothes. Before you know it, they’re being beaten up and then on the floor. After that, they were dragged into their cells, which is where the escape room elements of the show came in, and people had to play different games to earn credits. Once you had these credits, they'd get to use them in a vending machine, which sounds completely random, but it just makes sense in this world. After that, they were dragged into their cells, which is where the escape room elements of the show came in, and people had to play different games to earn credits. Once you had these credits, they'd get to use them on a vending machine, which sounds completely random, but the items inside it - from weapons to packets of Magic Stars, USBs with data on them - they’d all help you in various ways. Without revealing too much, the most unexpected items often held the greatest value in escaping DEATHCELL. Some guests would casually snack on their picked bag of Magic Stars chocolate, unaware that their choice could impact their gameplay. Eventually, inside the Warden’s office, guests discovered the Warden’s connection to Yellow, unraveling more of their relationship before the experience ended in a chaotic chase sequence. It's been really fun going back and looking at that show, now knowing that we're going back to the very beginning of the story, with a world that has expanded massively beyond what this original did. DEATHCELL (2018) Photos: R Space Productions IR: That original show also set up the world of DEATHCELL and explained why those prisons exist right? Steph: Yeah. The reason these penitentiaries exist in this universe is to bring harmony to people. Imagine a world where there's lots of unrest, lots of divided communities. Within this world, a system is brought in called the ‘Harmony Act’ to ensure that people are behaving themselves and if someone upsets you, or you upset someone, you or them can nominate each other to be picked up and taken to these penitentiaries to be conditioned into behaving better within society. As time went on, they became more and more corrupt, and this one in particular became the most corrupt and is so run down that it isn't part of that system anymore. The Warden became obsessed with playing with the prisoners that came in, and therefore, it's branded as DEATHCELL. IR: I can't recall many other shows from around that time that combined immersive theatre, scare attractions and escape rooms into one experience. Would you describe the original DEATHCELL as unique for its time? Steph: I think it was bold. I can't say for sure we were the first to do it, but as far as I’m aware, we were one of the first to merge those three elements - immersive storytelling escape room experience and run-out scare attraction - and we've just built on it since then. Escape rooms were big at that point, I remember them coming out around 2015, especially horror scare rooms, and there were a lot of escape room elements starting to be experimented with in the scare world, but I feel like we were just really bold at mashing it all together and saying, ‘This could work. We’re just going to go for it.’ Now, I can't see us ever not doing that. It's great to see how quickly the horror and scare industry has expanded in the last six years. Back when I started scare acting 15 years ago, it was all very linear, on-shoulders experiences. I can't speak for what went on in America or in Europe, but definitely within the UK. Nowadays, people want a story; people want to be immersed as soon as they go in and want to feel like they're living and breathing it. Video: R Space Productions IR: Are there any stand-out experiences that you remember combining at least two of those three elements? Steph: Back in 2015, I went to see a show called Generation of Z: Apocalypse ; it was by a company from New Zealand. They’d done the Edinburgh Fringe with the show, and I think it was in Mile End when it was London, but that was the first show I went to that had immersive scares, and it broke the rule book to what I knew it to be. It inspired me to want to create theatre like that. I'd worked in scare attractions and was a bit desensitised, but I went into that show, and I was running through underground corridors away from zombies. Obviously, I’m a scare actor, so I know it's not real, but I was running away from it, and I really believed I was in that world for an hour and a half. You had to help someone make it to the operating theatre, distract a zombie, and rescue people. It just opened my eyes to the idea that scare could be so much more. That was a show that really inspired me, and it was one of the first ones I'd seen or experienced something outside of the usual linear attractions that I'd been so used to seeing and performing in. Photo: R Space Productions People want a story; people want to be immersed as soon as they go in and want to feel like they're living and breathing it. IR: DEATHCELL: Magenta, the prequel, is a couple of weeks away from opening, but at one point, you'd planned on opening a sequel to that original 2018 show, right? Steph: Yeah. Back in 2020, we were supposed to do, as we now call it DEATHCELL 2 as a project name. We were looking at a venue at the time, and then obviously COVID came about. We were maybe one or two weeks away from releasing tickets. We're very lucky that we didn't because obviously, the pandemic happened, and we were just about to sign onto a venue. We spent lockdown rewriting that experience. We spent hours on Zoom with various members of the team, just workshopping it, rewriting it, and Magenta soon had more of a part to play in that story. However, the world hasn't seen DEATHCELL 2 yet…and it’s still in the works. IR: Can you tell us a bit about the character of Magenta and how she fits into the wider DEATHCELL world? Steph: When we originally did the pilot, Magenta wasn't in that document or the concept I'd written. However, when we went to add in the escape room elements of the 2018 show, we were questioning, “Why are the games there? Who's been making them?” We came up with the idea of a character called Magenta. We didn't know what she looked like back then; we didn't know what her part in DEATHCELL was apart from that she's the person who creates these games. We didn't know where she necessarily sat in the story, but it gave us enough scope to go ‘Okay, she's the mastermind behind the games’. It gave us a concept to work with to make sure that the games and the theming in those rooms made sense, but it wasn't really communicated to the guests. From an audience point of view, you wouldn't know Magenta existed. Since 2020, we've developed Magenta further, and when we started to talk about this experience, we went ‘Well, if this is a prequel, why don't we tell the story of Magenta and DEATHCELL becoming DEATHCELL?' Photo: R Space Productions Everything needs to have a purpose, so we wouldn't put a jump scare in if there was no need to put a jump scare in. IR: How does your approach to creating these experiences change depending on the length? The 2018 show was 30 minutes, a typical Fright Nights experience is under 10 minutes, but DEATHCELL: Magenta is a full hour-long experience. Steph: When it comes to a lot of scare attractions I’ve worked in at Halloween events such as Fright Nights, you are in there for about 7 to 10 minutes, sometimes quicker depending on if you run out! You only have that limited time to tell an entire story. The theming, the scripts, the character work, the type of scares you have… they need to be snappy because if people don't get the story in those 7 minutes, they potentially come out saying ‘I don't know what I just saw’. You have to be very self-explanatory or utilise things like your marketing, queue lines and your pre-show characters to really tell that story. It’s got to pack a punch as you don't have time to delve into a backstory or characters. Equally, some people don’t necessarily want to hear a story, they just want to be scared, right? These attractions always require the same amount of background work, but guests might not get to see all of that. The types of performance you do is going to be different in fast-paced attractions because someone is going to be in a room for a couple of seconds, and then they're going to be into the next one. How you deliver that performance is very different from how we've got to do it in Magenta. We have the luxury of delving deeper into a story and deeper into the characters. In the world where you’ve got 60 minutes, you have more time to tell a story and delve into emotions a lot more, however, guests are going to be in the space for longer so you’ve got to add more details in to make sure that they aren’t looking around and noticing all the gaps in your experience. IR: Do you feel like you need to pack in loads of scares to match people's expectations if they're used to a Fright Nights style experience? Steph: We still have elements for people needing that scare factor. At the end of the day, that’s where we all started. Without saying too much, there are bits in the show that have that, but all of it is with purpose. I feel like everything needs to have a purpose, so we wouldn't put a jump scare in if there was no need to put a jump scare in. We’re quite good at having honest debates about that - does this character really need to be in there, and what does the guest take from it? For us, it’s all about the story, the world building and being immersed as soon as you go in, forgetting that you're in Hackney Wick and have come to watch a show. People are booking because they want to be immersed in the story. Photo: R Space Productions IR: You mentioned earlier that the 2018 DEATHCELL experience had multiple paths for people to go down. Is that the case with this new experience? Steph: This one is more guided. Guests will naturally have their own say in how their room experience goes because of the puzzles they are doing and how they go about them. But for this experience, the end goal is always the same because we want to lead people into the next chapter, which is DEATHCELL 2. With Magenta, we want guests to come along for the journey and not have different outcomes at this point because it’ll confuse the story later on. Your end goal is always the same, but your experience in each room and how various characters or things around you will react will depend on what you do.  DEATHCELL 2 will definitely have elements of multi-route. The guests will decide how the show is going to end without knowing it, and then we'll have, in theory, a couple of minutes to switch that on and deliver one of 3 or 4 different endings. Photo: R Space Productions IR: What were your earliest experiences with scare attractions, and how did you find yourself working in that world? Steph: I'm a big believer in fate. You might not understand it at the time, but three years later, you'll look back and understand why. In 2010, I finished studying Performing Arts at Bath Spa University. I was the only third year on my course who didn't get picked for a show - all of them had been picked to be main leads in West Side Story, at The Minack Theatre in Cornwall, and I was devastated. At that point, you feel like you've failed, right? You're like, ‘I'm the only person who's not been picked. What's wrong with me?’ So I felt quite defeated. I remember sitting in this empty house in Bath, and I said to myself, ‘I'm just going to try and make it, whatever make it means’. My family lived near Chessington World of Adventures, so I looked on the Merlin website, and they were doing scare auditions for Scream in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds in London. I thought, ‘Oh, that's the dungeon thing I went to last year and quickly ran up the stairs from’. I was such a wuss back in the day, I'd been to the London Dungeons once before and screamed all the way round. Maybe a week later, I picked up The Stage newspaper, opened it up, and there was the same advert for [Madame Tussaud’s] Scream in there. I thought it was fate. The auditions were in Old Street, so I went to it and then didn't think I was going to get it. I finished the audition, waiting for the call out, and they called me back for the following day for what they call Scare School. I remember leaving thinking, ‘Oh, I actually did something; they want to see me’. I went through two or three days of Scare School, which is basically learning how to be a scare performer. Testing your agility, physical endurance, character work, how you can apply physical theatre to what you're doing, and I'm quite a physical performer - which actually shows in Magenta - you can see in her in her physicality and the way she moves around the space, she's quite creaturesque, or less human than others. I was offered the job to be a scare performer for four months, and I just found my thing. I was suddenly with people who were on the same wavelength as me; I was around so many creative people of different ages. I ended up being extended, and then as more scare actors came in, they’d start talking about other events such as Fright Nights at Thorpe Park and how they go and do it every year. The following year, I auditioned, and I was cast in The Asylum, which was one of their best-loved scare attractions. Over the next couple of years, I was a Show Captain at Thorpe Park for Fright Nights, so I got to look after the performers every Halloween, and it's just gone on from there. I’ve worked on attractions like Saw Alive and Cabin In The Woods, and I eventually became a Team Leader of Entertainment at Thorpe Park, which is where I met a lot of the R Space members. In 2019 as Entertainments Experience Manager, I got to write experiences like Trailers for Fright Nights, and got to work on other experiences such as Derren Brown’s Ghost Train and work globally on the Tussauds brand in 2022 and 2023. More recently, I became a Project Manager for large-scale events such as Fright Nights, Mardi Gras, Oktoberfest, and working with loads of different stakeholders in the industry. IR: Looking back on your career so far, R Space has been a constant for nearly half of it. I guess R Space wouldn't exist without you being in that world.. Steph: Yeah. I've gone from being an actor who fell into doing scare acting for four months to this becoming my entire life, and R Space has been a thread through that for the last seven years, but the jobs that I've done have 100% helped me to become the person I am in R Space. I think R Space has also allowed me to grow in other areas of work because I've been out there in the eld with less protection and structure, so I’ve had to go and the answers myself. I feel like I’ve been out and earned my stripes to make me a great all-rounder, but I still have lots to learn and I still enjoy dipping back into scare acting ever so often. At Fright Nights, I always try to go back in and do some scaring in the new attractions. As the industry grows and grows, I think there's more weight on the performers now. They've got seven minutes to get this whole story across, whereas beforehand, and not to discredit it, you could focus more on jump scares, and people would be scared and run out. That still works, but now people want a story; people want elaborate costumes. The stakes are higher now when you're scare performing because people expect more.   Photo: R Space Productions IR: You're set to be playing the titular Magenta in the upcoming show. What has it been like stepping into Magenta's shoes? It's quite a different kind of role from what you've typically done in scare attractions. Steph: Yeah. I haven't performed outside of scare performing for a really, really long time. I'd say that out of the entire project, that's the bit that scares me the most. All the bits that we need to sort in the next couple weeks, not so much. The performing aspect makes me go ‘Oh God, I haven't done this for a really long time.' I felt a bit self-conscious about doing it, but that's because the type of performance I've done recently has been very physical without any dialogue. When we were shaping this character on set, the team were amazing. Jimm, our Head of Creative and Production, has been our main lead in terms of the short film elements. He and the other performers around me really helped me feel at ease more when shooting. When we shot [the short film content] in August, that was probably one of the highlights of my year. I hadn't performed in a really long time, but I came away feeling like I'd challenged myself. I'm always thinking about how to play her or how to be her, but it's been a journey. I'm a great physical performer when it comes to scare acting, but Magenta isn't scare just acting. She's telling the story. IR: Finally, what do you hope people will take away from the experience? Steph: What I am most excited about is for people to be immersed as soon as they get there, see how big the story is, how much we have thought about everything, and how much work has gone into delivering it. We could have easily just done a short film, we could have just done an escape room, we could have just done a piece of theatre, but we decided to bash them all together. I want people to come away with it stuck in their minds. Either because of the story or how we’ve delivered the experience. DEATHCELL: Magenta will run from 21st February to 1st March 2025 at a secret location in Hackney Wick. Tickets are on sale now, starting from £30.00. For more info and to book, visit deathcell.co.uk A massive thank you to Steph and Liam from R Space for taking the time to sit down with us for this interview.

Hush Collective's ethereal performances offer up an alternative way to engage with live music for a blindfolded audience in the dark. Photo: Ian Olsson Seeing live music in London is an experience often made up of small annoyances. Your sightline of the stage will be interrupted by phones being raised into the air. People will constantly squeeze past you, trying to find their friends or get to the bar. The music may be drowned out by people talking nearby. It's a dice roll every time you go to a gig, and the behaviour of the audience around you can have a big impact, ultimately distracting you from what's on stage and pulling you out of the experience. We accept all of this to connect with music in a live environment. There is, however, an alternative where none of that are an issue... In The Dark by Hush Collective is a tightly controlled 'immersive' experience that's been designed to ensure there are no barriers or distractions between the audience and what's most important - the music. Performed in dimly-lit venues, with the audience wearing sleep masks throughout, anything that could pull you out of the experience has been removed, and everything else - from what you're going to hear to who exactly is performing - remains a secret until the performance. Photo: Ian Olsson During our visit, a collection of 11 tracks was performed by the 26-person-strong Hush Collective, who roam the venue barefoot during the performance at St. Bartholomew the Great near Farringdon . Bookended by Sigur Rós' Festival, every song performed had an ethereal, other-worldly feeling. Lesser-known songs from the likes of Colplay and Mumford and Sons sit alongside hauntingly beautiful renditions of songs by Mree, Garth Stevenson and Ane Brun to create the kind of soundscape fitting for within the walls of the 900-year-old building. Over the course of the 60-minute performance, it gently moves you into a zen-like meditative state, with no external stimuli besides the music to hold your attention. With no central stage for the members of Hush Collective to be situated on, the performance takes place with the musicians and vocalists spread around the venue, creating an analogue 360° listening experience. Depending on where in the room you're sitting, you'll likely pick up on different details, with some voices and instruments standing out from the rest as they all echo through the space. The sound of certain instrumentals will become louder as the performers approach you, then recede into the background as they pass by. Everyone's experience of the performance will differ, purely based on where they're seated. Photo: Ian Olsson Being blindfolded for the duration allows your other senses to become heightened. Those seated on the aisles likely picked up on the movement of air as the performers walked up and down, the rustling of coats and squeak of chairs was more pronounced, and the familiar smell of the building became more noticeable as the evening progressed. We're capable of picking up on all of these things in our day-to-day lives, but how often are we allowed to sit and notice them without distraction? It's an eerily beautiful and emotional experience for those who attend. In The Dark is unlike any performance we've ever attended, and if it encourages people to focus on the music when at gigs in the future without distracting those around them, it'll have changed live music for the better. We'll certainly be keeping our phones in our pockets going forward... Photos: Ian Olsson ★★★★ In The Dark is playing at St Bartholomew the Great near Farringdon and Trinity Buoy Wharf near Canning Town on various dates across March 2025. Tickets are priced from £35. To find out more visit in-the-dark.com

You Me Bum Bum Train, The legendary immersive theatre show, returned to London's west end in November after an eight-year absence Photo: Kirk Newmann Update: This article has been amended to reflect the new, extended closing date of the ballot, which is now 9th February 2025. You Me Bum Bum Train (YMBBT), the legendary, boundary-pushing immersive show which returned to London's West End in November 2024, has opened its ticket ballot for 2025 shows. The show was founded by Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd. You Me Bum Bum Train was previously named as one of The Times' 25 best plays of the century, won the Milton Shulman Award for Outstanding Newcomer at The Evening Standard Awards in 2010, was nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Affiliate Theatre at the Olivier Awards in 2013 and was the Barbican's fastest ever selling show. The show is a surreal, exhilarating, euphoric and mind-bending participatory experience that sends its audience, or ‘Passengers’, through a dream-like carousel of scenes, fantasies, and, in some cases, life-altering experiences. Loved by hundreds of thousands, yet shrouded in near-total secrecy, since 2004, YMBBT   has redefined what it means to be part of an audience. For the last show in 2015, there were over 120,000 people applying for tickets in the first minute of release. Photo: Kirk Newmann The show’s impact depends largely on Passengers having no idea what they are about to experience so they react authentically. Secrecy is therefore an integral aspect of You Me Bum Bum Train, with no details about the production released whatsoever. This ensures the show is experienced at its best, with the proven power to change lives and perspectives. All passengers sign NDAs, which prevents them from sharing what they have experienced. The ballot will close on 9th February at midnight .  Each ballot entry will allow passengers to book a maximum of two tickets which are priced at £99.99 + booking fee. Successful participants will receive an email or SMS from 11th February with a link to purchase their tickets. There is a concessionary ballot ticket price for those on job seeker’s allowance. Photo: Kirk Newmann In addition to experiencing the show as a Passenger, You Me Bum Bum Train relies on a community of volunteers who come together and contribute their time, resources and skills to make a special, meaningful experience for audience members. Without this community, the project would not be affordable and would simply not exist. YMBBT offers free training and certification across production, stage management and performance. Many of the volunteers have gained newfound confidence and skills, and more come on board with each show, many of them ex-passengers who want to contribute to the next show themselves. The ticket ballot for You Me Bum Bum Train is open now via bumbumtrain.com , and closes at midnight on 9th February. Successful applicants will be informed from the 11th February.

Photo: DARKFIELD Acclaimed immersive theatre producers DARKFIELD will take up residency in Shoreditch Town Hall basement The Ditch this April, bringing their latest critically acclaimed experience ARCADE to the venue alongside three additional experiences. ARCADE first premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024 and later enjoyed a sell-out run at BFI London Film Festival. For the first time, DARKFIELD will present one of their experiences outside their trademark shipping container, with ARCADE transposed into the untouched basement of iconic Grade II listed Shoreditch Town Hall. Photo: Kate Edwards Using the nostalgic 8-bit aesthetic of 1980’s video games, ARCADE’s interactive narrative explores the evolving relationship between players and avatars. Over 30 minutes, audiences will choose their own path through the story whilst experiencing DARKFIELD’s signature 360-degree binaural sound and sensory effects for a fully immersive experience.  Each at their own individual arcade machine, players will guide their avatar through a world ravaged by endless war: you can choose a side, win or lose the war, search for a peaceful route, or join a cult promising a better version of reality. Players will ask themselves difficult questions, as they navigate a world where some will win and others will lose. No two journeys through the experience will be the same. Photos: Kate Edwards As part of the residency, audiences can expect a purpose-built bar, and also experience a trio of additional shows - DOUBLE, VISITORS and ETERNAL - all of which were originally part of the online-only DARKFIELD Radio Season One in 2020, and are being presented as physical installations for the first time. Speaking on their upcoming residency, DARKFIELD said: We are so excited to be coming to Shoreditch Town Hall for a residency this April, especially bringing ARCADE - our most ambitious show to date - into such a unique space as The Ditch. This will be the first time that we have transposed one of our shipping container shows into a new environment and it just feels like the perfect fit. We can’t wait to see DARKFIELD AT THE DITCH fully realised and really hope our audiences enjoy exploring the world they are immersed in. Ellie Browning, Head of Cultural Programme at Shoreditch Town Hall, commented: Our atmospheric basement space The Ditch is perfect for populating with pioneering immersive experiences, and so we are thrilled to host a DARKFIELD takeover this Spring. Their seriously clever use of tech, coupled with interactive narratives transports players to other worlds and promises experiences that our audiences won't forget. DARKFIELD at The Ditch runs at Shoreditch Town Hall from 1st April to 12th April 2025. Tickets to ARCADE are priced from £14.00, with DOUBLES, VISITORS and ETERNALS all priced at £8.00, or £6.00 when booked alongside ARCADE. For more information, and to book visit shoreditchtownhall.com