Photo: Netflix This Spring, fans of Netflix’s award-winning South Korean survival drama, Squid Game, will be plunged into the heart of the drama in the brand-new ‘Squid Game: The Experience’ which will be opening its doors at Immerse LDN at the Excel London Waterfront. Heading to the UK capital after successful runs in New York, Sydney, Seoul, and Madrid, ‘Squid Game: The Experience’ is presented by Netflix in collaboration with The Luna Entertainment Group and LETSGO. Photo: Netflix Perfect for fans of the series and thrill-seekers alike, teams compete for 60 minutes as they take on five challenges inspired by the television series’ nail-biting tasks including ‘Red Light, Green Light’ under the watchful eye of the haunting Young-hee doll, the nerve-wracking Glass Bridge and the intense Marbles game. Photo: Netflix Once the game is over, players can gather in the Korean-inspired Night Market where they will be able to purchase exclusive ‘Squid Game: The Experience’ merchandise, buy a range of food and snacks and pose for a celebratory photo opportunity to remember the experience. Squid Game: The Experience will open at Immerse LDN this Spring. The waitlist for pre-sale access is open now, ahead of tickets going on general on-sale on 25 April 2025. For more info, and to sign-up for presale, visit squidgameexperienceuk.com

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

Photo: World Experience Organisation World Experience Organisation (WXO) today announced a new venue for its forthcoming World Experience Summit (WXS 2025). The event will run from 29th April through to 1st May 2025 at Phantom Peak in Canada Water. This year’s Summit will see Phantom Peak’s enigmatic in-world corporation JONACO join as Official Corporate Partners, with the town’s residents offering up a host of surprises across the event's three days, including a keynote from Mayor Pocket himself. World Experience Summit debuted at Phantom Peak in 2023 before moving to New York’s House of Yes for its 2024 event. This year’s event will see over 500 of the Experience Economy’s leading professionals descend on East London - over double the number who attended 2023’s debut event. Photo: World Experience Organisation In the two years since they last hosted the Summit, Phantom Peak has gone from strength to strength. Its average yearly audience has grown twofold, and its community now boasts almost 1,000 superfans with a 30% return rate. It's received multiple awards, including the TripAdvisor Travellers’ Choice Award (top 10% of things to do worldwide), and a coveted blooloop Innovation Award, naming it the global best immersive experience for 2024. Speaking on WXO 2025, World Experience Organisation founder and CEO, James Wallman, comments: Phantom Peak is a living, breathing example of the Experience Economy in action. Not only is it an amazing immersive experience for an intergenerational audience, it's a financially successful operation that shows how experiences can be as profitable as they are awe-inspiring. Nick Moran, co-founder of Phantom Peak, said the following on hosting WXO 2025 for the second time: Phantom Peak is where it all started for the World Experience Summit, and we can’t wait to welcome back old friends as well as meet the new ones the WXO’s fast-growing event is attracting. Photo: World Experience Organisation World Experience Summit 2025 is part of the debut London Experience Week, which takes place between Monday 28 April and Friday 2 May 2025. As well as hosting the third iteration of the World Experience Summit, London Experience Week showcases the best of the UK capital city’s blossoming experience economy. A citywide Experience Safari will be announced in the coming weeks, with a full roster of London venues and events that both WXS attendees and the public can visit free of charge. London Experience Week partners London & Partners are working with WXO to secure the very best in London venues, with an initial roster to include exclusive behind-the-scenes experiences at the likes of Monopoly Lifesized & London Tea Tour, Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds: The Immersive Experience, Battersea Power Station, The Crystal Maze LIVE Experience, Bridge Command, Cahoots Borough, Frameless, Paradox Museum, Alcotraz, ExCel's Tutankhamun: The Immersive Exhibition and the forthcoming Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue. WXO Head of Content, Mike Goldsmith, comments: Phantom Peak is a superb example of the capital’s experiential creativity and business smarts and thus the perfect venue for London Experience Week. As well as hosting the best speakers, talks and experiences, we are contractually obliged to announce that World Experience Summit 2025 will also see JONACO, the company that canonically runs the town of Phantom Peak, join us as Official Corporate Partners. That means the Summit will not only see the more ‘interesting’ townsfolk of Phantom Peak entertain WXS attendees over all three days, but Mayor Pocket has some ‘surprise announcements’ which he threatens to reveal in the keynote session he has insisted on giving. We here at WXO are a little concerned but have been told that an unwavering belief in the Cosmic Platypus and JONACO will guide us. Gulp. Photo: World Experience Organisation The World Experience Organisation Summit will run from 29th April to 1st May 2025 at Phantom Peak in Canada Water. London Experience Week will run from 28th April to 3rd May 2025 at various venues around London, with more details to be announced. To find out more about the events and book tickets, visit worldxo.org

Described as 'London Fashion Week for Experiences', WXO's Summit and London Experience Week 2025 will bring together industry leaders from around the world for a five-day exchange of ideas later this month. Photo: World Experience Organisation With WXO's (World Experience Organisation) London Experience Week and World Experience Summit 2025 only a few weeks away, details of this year's speakers, talks and event schedule have been announced and will feature talks from some of the people behind Las Vegas' AREA15, Meow Wolf, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, Secret Cinema and Punchdrunk. Kicking off the five-day long event on Monday 28th April, a London-wide Experience Safari invites guests to see the inner workings of various immersive and interactive experiences with backstage tours of Titanic: Echos From The Past and Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue, a tour of L-Acoustic's spatial sound showroom in Highgate and the d&b Immersive Technology Experience Centre at the Science Museum. Video: World Experience Organisation Also on offer is a tour of Old Royal Naval College that dives into the site's extensive history as a filming location for the likes of Bridgerton and Pirates of the Caribbean, as well as two Campfires from Joe Pine (author of The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money) and Amber Case, who will discuss 'How To Craft Seamless Experiences'. In the evening, London Experience Week invites attendees to the immersive, prison-themed cocktail experience Alcotraz in Hoxton, before a social at Good Hotel London in Royal Victoria Dock. Photo: World Experience Organisation On Tuesday 29th April, the World Experience Organisation Summit will take over the entirety of Phantom Peak for three days of talks, campfires, workshops and networking. Starting things off, there's 'Down The Tunnel' and 'Cross The Threshold' - two experiences produced by George Berlin and Frances Viera Blanc, as well as an address from WXO's CEO James Wallman on the State Of The Experience Economy. From there, attendees will have a choice of events to sit in on from the likes of Sasha Frieze (The Chief Event Officer's Playbook), Louis Alfieri (AI Unleashed: Redefining the Entertainment Ecosystem), and Maria Redin and Lou Pizante (Cracking the X-Stack), all occupying different corners of Phantom Peak's 30,000-square foot venue. There's a range of real-world case studies also set to be discussed throughout the day, including a look at how ITV have previously used experiences from the likes of SWAMP to launch TV shows, with plenty more case studies still TBA. Later in the day, the question Does Everything Have to be Immersive? will be posed to the Summit, before Tim Hill details the 4 Steps to Superfans, and Laura Citron explains Why Cities Need Experiences. Rounding off Day 1 of the World Experience Summit 2025, there's a networking session before the winners of the World Experience Awards are announced. Photo: World Experience Organisation Diving into Wednesday 30th April at Phantom Peak, there's the intriguingly named Immersive Audio Magic Mushroom Experience in the morning, the two-hour long Unconference - which is made up of 12 different sessions spread across the venue, in which any attendee can take the stage to share their knowledge - finishing off the morning. The afternoon welcomes Luke Mitchell and Mike Goldsmith to discuss Boomtown Fair's sprawling, festival-wide immersive elements, and Bristol's iconic venue, Wake The Tiger. Alongside that, a roundtable featuring some of the minds behind Elvis Evolution (Andrew McGuinness), The Traitors Experience (Neil Connolly), ABBA Voyage (Ryan Amstad) and Minecraft Experience (Olivier Goulet) will discuss developing and opening IP-driven experiences in the Town Square. David Shulman will host a workshop on getting Investor Ready, and Tracy Sorgiovanni from Riot Games and Justine Tommey from Major League Baseball are just some of the confirmed names set to be hosting case studies that afternoon. In the evening, the London Experience Night Safari kicks off... Photo: World Experience Organisation Giving attendees the opportunity to head out into the city to see, hear, and feel first-hand everything London's experience economy has to offer, over 20 experiences will open their doors to the WXO community, including Bridge Command, Phantom Peak, ABBA Voyage, Lost Estate's Paradise Under The Stars, Avora, Moonshine Saloon, Bubble Planet, Jury Games and Come Alive! Thursday sees a Live WXO Campfire with James Wallman, the return of the Unconference, Bompas & Parr's Kirsten Wilson and Sam Bompas discussing why F&B Is The Essential Immersive Ingredient, Patrick Flynn and Sermad Buni share how Squid Games: The Trials came to be, and there's a workshop on spatial storytelling from Mel McGowan alongside numerous other talks, workshops and case studies, before a Summit Wrap Party at Immerse LDN. On top of this, the summit will also feature a host of extra content and experiential areas, which will feature surprise pop-ups, across all three days, and there are dozens of additional talks and workshops not mentioned here. Video: World Experience Organisation The finale of London Experience Week on Friday 2nd May features a creative studio visit at Marshmallow Laser Feast, a visit to the opening night of spatial audio festival Polygon Live, exclusive tours of BoraBora at Outernet, and an exclusive LXW backstage tour of Layered Reality's Elvis Evolution, which is set to open this summer. Across the whole of London Experience Week, attendees will also have access to discounts on tickets to a huge range of experiences across the city, including ABBA Voyage, Frameless, Lost Estate's 58th Street and Paradise Under The Stars, Moco Museum, The Paddington Bear Experience, Monopoly Lifesized, Minecraft Experience and Tutankhamun Immersive Experience. Tickets for London Experience Week are on sale now via worldxo.org, with applications currently open for their Scholarship Programme, which allows those early in their careers or unable to afford a full-price ticket to potentially still attend. Photo: World Experience Organisation All of the information shared in this article is subject to change. Please check the most up-to-date version of London Experience Week schedule here. London Experience Week will run from 28th April to 3rd May 2025 at various venues around London. To find out more about the events and book tickets, visit worldxo.org

You Me Bum Bum Train, The legendary immersive theatre show, return to London's west end November 2024 after an eight-year absence Photo: Kirk Newmann You Me Bum Bum Train (YMBBT), the legendary, boundary-pushing immersive show has announced its long-anticipated return to London's West End for November 2024. Founded by Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd, You Me Bum Bum Train returns following a near-decade absence. The show 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. You Me Bum Bum Train 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 YMBBT will open in London’s Covent Garden in November 2024. 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 preventing them from sharing what they have experienced. The ballot will close at 9pm BST on 17th September. 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 on 20th September with a link to purchase their tickets. All unclaimed tickets will re-enter into a second ballot, the date of which is TBA. There will be 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 opens on 3rd September at 10am via bumbumtrain.com. The show was run from November 2024 in a Central London location.

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

When Muddled Marauders' Vegetables was first announced to run at a secret location in Clerkenwell last year, mystery surrounded the show’s content. Those who did attend stepped into a dark comedy that focused on an exiled scientist’s experiments to cure all manner of physical ailments by uploading people's consciousness into root vegetables. It was a bizarre and surreal show that defied expectations and was one of the most talked-about immersive shows of the summer, garnering strong word-of-mouth and a string of positive reviews. Recently, we sat down with Nathan Ess, the brains behind Muddled Marauders, for their first-ever interview to discuss how the company came to be, how his unconventional beginnings creating immersive off-grid parties led to the creation of Vegetables, and what's next for the company. Photo: Muddled Marauders Immersive Rumours: Hi Nathan, thanks for sitting down with us today. Let’s kick things off by discussing the origins of Muddled Marauders and your history of putting on interactive and immersive events. It was quite a unique entry into the immersive world for you, right? Nathan Ess: Yeah. A lot of it started with experimentation in rave culture. A friend of mine lived in a tower block in Plaistow, and one year I convinced him to let me throw a New Year's Eve party on its rooftop. It went unexpectedly well; something clicked, and I wanted to see if it had legs. After a few small things gained traction, I started Muddled Marauders with a forest party in Wick Woodland. Everything was sorted, but we arrived there too early, and a police helicopter spotted us. The Park Rangers told us it would get shut down before we started. So it was 7pm, the evening of our first proper event, loads of people getting ready to join us, and we didn't have a clue where we were going to do it. Muddled Marauders 001 in Walthamstow Marshes Photo: Muddled Marauders My friend Lucy and I were biking around North East London, frantically trying to pull it out of the bag. At around 9pm, she called me saying, ‘I’ve found somewhere’. There was this secret forest spot in Walthamstow Marshes, just north of Clapton. By 10 pm, we were setting up. By 11pm, we texted everyone the address. Come midnight, 400 people had arrived, with the party going until 11am. The thrill of it all was instantly addictive. From there, things progressed quite quickly. I think our risky approach to sourcing spaces people hadn't been to before, as well as the playfulness of the design and the music, made it catch on quite quickly. IR: A lot of these experiences are undocumented, and you can’t find much about them online. There is mention of one event you did that involved a huge tunnel maze in the middle of a forest. Can you tell us about that? Nathan: Yeah. A couple of years deep, we were commissioned by a festival. Up until then, everything we’d done had been in London, but this was for a small festival in Grimsby. In order to help them sell tickets, we were given a bit of money to build something and entice our crowd up there. As well as building a stage, we built an 800-metre-long maze with 14 immersive scenes themed around a narrative of relationships and sexual anxiety called The Corridor of Uncertainty. It was actually based on a really shit drawing I’d done a couple of years earlier... The Corridor of Uncertainty Photo: Nathan Ess The maze only opened for 2 hours, right in the middle of the second night. It was designed for people to get completely lost in, with 3-metre-high walls built from poles and thick black sheeting. You’d go around in circles and might be walking for 5 minutes before you’d end up in an STI clinic being told you’ve contracted a rare infection. Turn a corner and you're apologising to all your exes. One doesn't care and still loves you; the next is calling you a prick and hitting you violently. A scene within the maze Photo: Muddled Marauders You’d be wandering again and enter a surreal restaurant with tiny tables ready for your first date - the whole thing was designed to be really awkward. Couples therapy was one of the best bits. All of it within the context of the maze, along with the hysteria of the night, had this punchy impact that resonated a lot with people. IR: It seems like you were doing your own version of a You Me Bum Bum Train experience… Nathan: I think Bum Bum Train is the best in the business, and their production is essentially a giant maze. I strongly believe that the more labyrinthine the structure, the more the participants will get enveloped in whatever experience they are going through. Being isolated from other people you know during an experience also heightens it 10 times over. I wouldn’t personally compare what I’ve done to YMBBT, given how big and good they are, but we share views on what creates impact. Set builders working on the entrance to the 800-metre long maze Photo: Muddled Marauders IR: Are there any other events you created around that time that stick out? Nathan: 'Never Have We Ever', which was in a huge abandoned school in Poplar, sticks out. There was also one in an empty hotel and another in a care home, which were pretty memorable. The best one we did was in three internally conjoined mansions in Islington. We commissioned and gave individual rooms to people with different ideas they had pitched, which they then brought to life. This created a fusion between festival, immersive experience and party - but with a distinctly debauched, underground London feeling. It was so big and mazy that we gave people an A3 map when they arrived to help them navigate it. I remember it being incredibly difficult to figure out how to leave, and often people just gave up trying. It went on for two days and was a real melting pot of the different cultures existing in London at that time. It also birthed Burt - a fictional Head of Promotions for Muddled Marauders who hates his job, which we made using stop-motion animation. Burt became a staple of the brand. Video: Muddled Marauders I think we reached the limit of how far we could push the format within the constraints of off-grid events with that particular production. Due to them being unlicensed events and the fact that the majority of the buildings we’d acquired were squatted, the amount of time and financial investment that would go into them wasn’t sustainable when there was always the risk of the police shutting it down before it started and not being able to make any of that money back, even if we were lucky that this only happened once. IR: One of the things I imagine you took away from creating all of those off-grid shows was the ability to make something out of nothing and overcoming unexpected problems. Would you say that was a good training ground for where you are now? Nathan: Yeah, they were pretty hardcore, and we constantly felt like we were trying to achieve something impossible. It needed pretty militant production skills, all the while trying to retain the focus on developing a fluffy and mysterious identity with actors and storylines. We've always had a strong team; Muddled Marauders stalwarts such as Joe Brann and James Phillips (Ariel Bold) have worked on pretty much everything, alongside an always massive crew that bring it all together. It makes unexpected problems much easier to overcome when you have a load of ride-or-die partners. Preparations for a party in an abandoned school in Poplar Photo: Muddled Marauders IR: When did the idea for Vegetables first come to you? Nathan: At a certain point, I got burnt out, so I moved to Sicily for about 8 months, living on a farm where I fed chickens. While out there, I started writing some scripts and concepts to form the basis of a transition into pure immersive theatre, and Vegetables was one of them. I finished the first draft and spoke to this Brixton-based company called BOSI, who suggested applying for Arts Council DYCP [Develop Your Creative Practice] funding, which was successful. I started refining Vegetables with Dan Wye - a drag performer (Séayoncé), stand-up comic and dramaturg. He was brutally honest, and it was such a steep learning curve. We completely rejigged it all, and I'd say he categorically made me a much better writer. Tom Duthie also really helped with the final edit of the script once we got the main project grant from ACE. IR: For those who didn’t attend Vegetables, how would you describe it? Nathan: It was a really dark comedy set within the underground tunnels of an old fire station in Central London. I don’t particularly enjoy describing the story itself, but the aim was to create something that people didn’t realise was theatre - let alone a comedy - until well into the experience. Lots of people knew they were coming to some kind of show, but many didn’t (including my mother), and the team and I took great pleasure in fucking with people’s expectations with the help of the incredible actors and design team led by Ellie Koslowsky (who was nominated at the Stage Debut Awards for Vegetables). 11 people could experience it per show. In terms of influences, Charlie Kaufman, Julia Davis, and Black Mirror were the primary ones. Ultimately I wanted it to be unhinged, subversive and well executed. Vegetables Photo: Muddled Marauders IR: There was also a community outreach aspect to the show that I think people might not be aware of. Can you tell us about that? Nathan: Yeah. The venue, which was an old fire station in Clerkenwell, was previously occupied by the Museum of Homelessness and The Outside Project, which offers shelter for LGBTQI+ people with lived experience of homelessness in London. We had an outreach strategy led by our producer and Museum of Homelessness founding member, B.Lain, and we allocated a third of the tickets to that community. The idea was to create a show that this community felt empowered to go to. A lot of communities don’t feel like the traditional, or even mainstream immersive theatre world is accessible, so by doing it in that space, it allowed us to flip that a bit. We also had workshops as part of the show at the Old Diorama on set design, acting, and sound design, and the products of those workshops were integrated into the show itself. The attendees of all those workshops had lived experience of homelessness. Clerkenwell Fire Station, the former home of Museum of Homelessness and The Outside Project Photo: Muddled Marauders IR: When Vegetables was first announced, there was real secrecy around it. By and large within immersive theatre, especially post-COVID, that seems to have been left behind as it feels more financially risky. Where did the desire to be secretive about what the show's content and story come from? Nathan: You only really get those hairs that stand up on your neck when you go into something a bit blind or when there are surprises. Whether that’s achieved or not, I'd rather prioritise the experiences of those who are willing to take a chance on something than put out a trailer that puts a wet flannel on it all just to appease incurious people. This isn’t to say that I don’t believe in marketing or an online presence. I love the science of marketing; I just prefer having fun with it and using it to add to the world of the production, like with Burt. For Vegetables, the Clerkenwell Bio Botanics website we used to entice people to the show took a serious amount of time to plan and build, but it worked despite at no point revealing it was secretly drawing people into a theatre show. I’m interested in pushing this side of things further. Vegetables Photo: Annie Tobin IR: In the last year, we've seen a few crowdfunders launched for various immersive shows, which reflects the fact that, obviously, getting funding for any theatre project is hard at the moment. If people are in a similar position to you and are looking to secure Arts Council funding, what advice would you give? Nathan: I think finding the right bid writer is important. I worked with an incredible bid writer and theatre-maker called Rosa Thomas, who was so invested in the project but also knew Arts Council funding applications like the back of her hand. I'm good with formal writing, but I have no doubt that I would not have gotten the funding without her. The first draft should come from you, but definitely do it with someone else. The second thing is to not be overly disheartened by the narrative around Arts Council. Even though there's less funding available overall, there is an impetus for them to fund new, grassroots projects and practitioners. IR: You mentioned earlier doing workshops as part of Vegetables, and you’ve also previously worked with the Museum of Homelessness. Can you tell us a bit about why doing outreach is so important to you and the company? Nathan: We live in a broken society, and we need to look out for each other. As much as I try to keep Muddled Marauders a bit aloof, it's crucial that everything we do is welcoming and approachable to those who are vulnerable, in whatever capacity. Particularly with how much of a shitshow everything is. This has been the case so far, and I’m determined for it to continue. As for the Museum of Homelessness, they're an incredible charity run by activists and creative pioneers, and we're long-term collaborators. They’ve now got a physical museum in Finsbury Park, and their second exhibition has just opened. As with last year, we've contributed a recurring fictional pirate radio show called Riot FM to that exhibition. Previously we designed an award-winning immersive show for them called Secret Museum, which explored the stories of those who experienced homelessness during the pandemic. We took stories donated to the museum and left clues and installations throughout the streets of Waterloo, culminating in guests finding our physical pop-up museum with live performances of those stories, told verbatim. Secret Museum by Museum of Homeless Photo: Museum of Homelessness IR: Looking to the future, what are you working on now? Nathan: I’m currently on the Senior Production Team for the current iteration of You Me Bum Bum Train. Muddled Marauders has taken a temporary side seat while I've been working on that, but it's been worth it. Next up for Muddled Marauders is our new show, which I am extremely excited about, but that’s all I can say for now. We’re also fundraising for the company's next chapter, as we’re looking to make some chunky steps forward. Find out more about Muddled Marauders at muddledmarauders.co.uk or via their Instagram. You Me Bum Bum Train are currently fundraising for War Child with a prize draw to win tickets to the show, which can be entered here. You can donate to Museum of Homelessness here, and The Outside Project here.

Image: Secret City The Perfect Bite, A Dinner Experience inspired by Rian Johnson's Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery takes a bite out of the captivating and thrilling universe of the Knives Out film series. This immersive and interactive event will have guests on the edge of their seats as they dine together and work to uncover a dark truth. In collaboration with Netflix, Secret City presents a one-of-a-kind murder mystery dinner experience launching for the first time in London. Photo: Secret City As a member of the culinary industry elite, you’re invited to an exclusive event hosted by acclaimed chef Maribelle Moore. Shortly after you arrive, Maribelle shockingly reveals that the menu she’s created for the evening will expose a dark secret about the Salty Six, the renowned culinary supergroup formed when they were students. With the other members of the Salty Six also in attendance, tensions begin to run high, and it isn’t long before a murderer strikes. Photo: Secret City Luckily, one of the world’s best detectives, Logan Locke, a contemporary of the famed detective Benoit Blanc, is on the scene to investigate and help you decipher the clues hidden within Maribelle’s menu. Each course contains vital information, and it’s up to you and your team to sift through the evidence and determine whodunnit. As you feast on food-based puzzles, you’ll unravel the twists and turns to solve this captivating mystery. Photo: Secret City Rally your friends together in your finest threads and experience Gaucho City of London. What was once the historic silver vaults of the Bank of England, is now a superb steak restaurant in London’s historical financial district. Enjoy an elevated 4-course meal while solving a thrilling whodunnit with a live cast of intriguing characters. The Perfect Bite has previously welcomed fans in Toronto and Vancouver, selling out for 3 consecutive months, serving over 3000 guests at the renowned Peter Pan Bistro. Photo: Secret City Secret City is a digital and location-based experience design studio with a multi-disciplinary team that builds digital and IRL experiences rooted in immersive storytelling, game mechanics and user experience design. Secret City blends theatre, gaming, technology and UX design to activate historical sites, museums and dormant spaces for fans who keep coming back. Established in 2014, Secret City has animated some of Toronto’s most notable landmarks: Casa Loma, George Brown House, Old Mill Toronto, The Village at Black Creek, Chinatown and Toronto’s waterfront with over 25 live immersive games, large-scale events and digital products. The Perfect Bite runs from 4th June 2025 at Gaucho City of London near Bank. Tickets are priced from £140 per person. For more information, and to book visit secretcityadventures.com

This Spring, Tutankhamun: The Immersive Exhibition, a new hi-tech experience will open its doors at Immerse LDN at Excel London Waterfront on 28th March 2025. Photo: Tutankhamun - The Immersive Exhibition After hugely successful runs in twelve other cities around the world, the exhibition invites visitors to step back in time and immerse themselves in an exhilarating journey, discovering ancient Egypt, and the myths and mysteries surrounding Pharaoh Tutankhamun as never before. Endorsed and supported by the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo and created in collaboration with Egyptologists and historians, the exhibition is set over a vast 26,909 sq ft space and features one of Europe’s largest immersive video mapping rooms with 8-metre-high projections. Blending cutting-edge technology with Egyptian history, the London exhibition will transport visitors through six creatively designed galleries that delve into the fascinating lives of the ancient Egyptians. Photo: Tutankhamun - The Immersive Exhibition Guests will enter via an infinity room with a walking Anubis before being presented with captivating background stories about Egyptian civilization alongside carefully curated replicas and artefacts. The experience continues into a huge immersive video mapping room which recounts the rich history of Egypt, its natural landscapes, cultural heritage, the life of Tutankhamun, his tomb, and its groundbreaking discovery. During the 30-minute immersive movie, the moment of the discovery of the tomb is described in a recorded interview of Howard Carter, the famous British archaeologist, adding a layer of authenticity to the experience. Visitors will also embark on a 360-degree seated virtual reality experience, journeying into the mystical Egyptian afterlife before entering yet another hi-tech space where they will witness a hologram presentation, bringing to life the entire mummification process of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Photo: Tutankhamun - The Immersive Exhibition Finally, the experience invites visitors to step into an interactive digital metaverse walk-through of the Valley of the Kings, exploring Howard Carter's basecamp, and reliving the monumental moment of the 1922 discovery in its full glory. At the end of the experience, every visitor will be able to capture a memento of their day with a photograph in the AI photobooth where they will be transformed into a citizen of ancient Egypt. The approximate 90-minute journey through ancient Egypt's rich history and mythology features a wealth of educational and informative displays, historical documents, original artefacts and replicas from ancient Egypt, and has been designed with children, families, schools and history enthusiasts in mind. The soundtrack has been composed specifically for the experience and is performed by an orchestra, immersing visitors further into the magic of ancient Egypt. Photo: Tutankhamun - The Immersive Exhibition Tutankhamun: The Immersive Exhibition has had over 1.8 million visitors in cities including Madrid, Hamburg, Cairo, Sao Paulo, Barcelona, Vienna and Malmö. Tutankhamun: The Immersive Exhibition run from 28th March - 29th June 2025 at Immersive LDN, Excel London. Adult tickets will be priced from £20, with children priced from £15.50. Tickets are on sale from 31st January 2025, and the waitlist is now open.

Photo: Ivy Corbin Sleepwalk Immersive have confirmed that Bacchanalia, their immersive production of The Bacchae by Euripides, will return to London in March 2025, taking over Hoxton Hall. Set in a psychedelic 1960s rendition of the city of Thebes, Bacchanalia is a free-roam performance that sees audience members able to follow a range of characters, including the captivating and horrifying Greek god of wine and pleasure, as Thebes falls from order into madness and debauchery. According to Sleepwalk Immersive, the new staging of the show will expand upon previous performances, with new content. Past performances saw a cast replete with performers renowned in the immersive world, as well as exciting newcomers. This upcoming run at Hoxton Hall promises to build on the well-received core of the show’s past runs, while further expanding the company’s vision for Bacchanalia. Photo: Ivy Corbin Speaking on the announcement via the Sleepwalk Immersive blog, Artistic Director Sebastian Huang said: When Hoxton approached us with the rare opportunity to take over not just their iconic auditorium, but also the rest of the building, we knew Bacchanalia had found its new home. The ready-made atmosphere that such a space provides, will allow us to further expand the vision that we have for Thebes and Bacchanalia as a whole. Stuart Cox, CEO of Hoxton Hall also said the following: We saw Bacchanalia at The Crypt and were so impressed. We so wanted to meet the Sleepwalk team and we are delighted it has led to this collaboration. We can’t wait for all Hoxton Hall’s spaces to be filled with the full vision of Sebastian Huang’s thrilling production and the exquisite choreography of Ruth Howard. Audiences are in for a real treat. Photo: Ivy Corbin Bacchanalia was previously staged at Crypt in Bethnal Green in November 2023, and enjoyed a sold-out run. The show later returned to the same venue in February and March 2024 after receiving overwhelmingly positive word-of-mouth from audiences. Critical praise for the show was equally strong, with The Stage highlighting it as one of the Top 50 Shows of 2023, and Broadway World describing Bacchanalia as a '"fascinating piece of immersive theatre". In our review of the show, we called it "one of the best new immersive shows of the year”. The show will run from 11th March to 6th April 2025, with tickets on sale 2nd November 2024. Those who sign up to become Friends of Sleepwalk can get early access to tickets, exclusive behind-the-scenes content, and a physical memento. Sleepwalk Immersive has also confirmed the return of enhanced tickets that grant access to unique experiences prior to entering Thebes in full. These experiences have been specially devised for the show's new venue, and are limited to just two tickets per performance. Photos: Ivy Corbin Talk of the show’s return and expansion had long been a possibility, with Sleepwalk Immersive’s Artistic Director Sebastian Huang and Associate Director Maya McQueen hinting at future versions of the show in an interview with Immersive Rumours prior to the show's initial 2023 opening. Sleepwalk Immersive is Sebastian Huang (Artistic Director), Ruth Howard (Movement Director), Maya McQueen (Associate Director/Producer), Peter Broughton (Co-Creator, Bacchanalia 23/24) and Madeleine Houghton (Producer/General Manager). Bacchanalia will run at Hoxton Hall from 11th March to 6th April 2025. Tickets are priced from £54.00 and can be purchased here. For more information about the show, visit sleepwalkimmersive.com

Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin Later this month, Sleepwalk Immersive’s Bacchanalia returns to London after two sold-out runs in 2023 and 2024. Set in a psychedelic 1960s reimagining of Thebes, the free-roam immersive experience invites audiences to follow a diverse cast of characters - including Dionysus, the mesmerising yet terrifying Greek god of wine and pleasure - as Thebes descends from order into chaos. The show's upcoming run, which will take over multiple floors of Hoxton Hall, expands on previous iterations of Bacchanalia with a longer run time, additional content, and more experiences for individual audience members. As rehearsals for the show got underway, we spoke with Sleepwalk Immersive’s Artistic Director, Sebastian Huang, about previously staging the show at CRYPT in Bethnal Green, how they came to secure Hoxton Hall for its return, and what audiences can expect from this expanded version of their 1960s-inspired Greek tragedy. Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin Immersive Rumours: Hi Sebastian. Thanks for speaking to us today! Can you tell us a bit about Sleepwalk Immersive and your role within the company? Sebastian Huang: I'm Sebastian Huang, and I'm the Artistic Director at Sleepwalk Immersive. It's basically my job to oversee the creative output of the company and to keep it all to a certain standard. Sleepwalk Immersive launched in 2023 specifically to grow Bacchanalia, which I had devised as a one-man show for an Extended Project Qualification when I was 16. The company mission has been to focus on storytelling and audience experience. We feel that we're part of the first generation making immersive theatre who have grown up with the form, and we're now on our third version of Bacchanalia but have also previously made some bespoke experiences for events. Pete Broughton and Maya McQueen, who were co-creatives for the earlier versions, are concentrating on performance this time around. Ruth Howard, our Movement Director, is my right hand and has been a real force for this 2025 iteration. The same goes for Joel Moffett, who has always run lighting and sound and has been a behind-the-scenes hero in every respect. For this run, we are also joined by Amy Warren as Company Stage Manager. She’s incredibly experienced and has worked for some of the biggest names in the sector. IR: Bacchanalia previously ran at CRYPT in 2023 and 2024, but for those who didn't attend those shows, do you mind giving us an overview of what it's all about? Sebastian: Bacchanalia is an adaptation of The Bacchae by Euripides, and we’ve set it in this 60s America-inspired world. We focus mainly on narrative and storytelling, but we try to use lots of different theatrical mediums such as dance, spoken word, puppetry, physical theatre, all of that. It's a fully free-roam immersive experience, and this time, we're going to be spanning multiple floors at Hoxton Hall. As an audience member, you can freely move as you wish throughout the space. You can follow a character, or follow a prop, or follow the music, and it's really all about giving the audience agency within the space to experience the story of the Greek god Dionysus coming to Thebes to avenge his mother and mess up the Theban family. Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin I don't think I could think so intensely about one project for so long if I didn't just love every second of it. IR: You first had the idea to adapt The Bacchae into an immersive show when you were in college, and all these years later, it's still something you've continued to work on. What is it about The Bacchae that’s kept you coming back to it for so long? Sebastian: I think from quite an early age, I loved the classical pantheons, the idea of multiple gods and their interactions with mortals. I think that always really intrigued me as a kid. When I studied The Bacchae as an A-Level text, it just clicked. I've always loved the Greek tragedies in theatre, and I was lucky enough to be exposed to some really phenomenal immersive theatre from quite an early age. It felt like a natural merge of two of my favourite passions. The reason I've been able to do it for seven years or so now is because I really love it. I love the story. I love the context of the myths, and I love immersive theatre. Luckily, I've been given the opportunity to create my own work, and I think that out of everything, what I've loved the most is being able to creatively voice my passions and what inspires me. I don't think I could think so intensely about one project for so long if I didn't just love every second of it. I just find it the most fun thing ever. IR: Bacchanalia is back next month at Hoxton Hall, but I’d love to chat about the show’s previous outing at CRYPT in Bethnal Green. What was it like getting the show mounted previously? Sebastian: I mean, obviously, it's not necessarily an easy endeavour. It took a lot of people working very hard and really putting themselves into the project. It was very stressful, and it's the hardest thing I've ever done. No matter how stressful it was though, we're very, very proud of what we created. With hindsight, if it wasn't for those two runs [at CRYPT] and the R&D's before, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing now. It's really nice to think about where it came from. To know that our hard work and all the blood, sweat, and tears we put into those first two runs hopefully have paid off now and have got us to where we are now is amazing. Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin IR: Looking back to 2023/2024, the critical response was really positive, and there was a lot of love for the show from audiences. How was it being on the receiving end of that as a new company mounting a new project? Sebastian: It was a bit of a whirlwind. I think the first run sold out in 16 days, which was obviously really cool, but at the time, we didn’t have much of a perception of that. We were a young team wanting to put on a show, and the stars kind of aligned. When you say it's a new project, it was a new project and a new team, but you know, I was the director, and I'm by far the least experienced on the team. If you look at the cast we got and the creative team we had, there was a lot of experience and a lot of combined years in the industry. For a lot of people, that 2023 run was the birth of Bacchanalia, but for me, I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager. It didn't necessarily feel like a new project to me at all. It just felt like the next steps of the project that I'd been working on for a while. IR: Following the second run of Bacchanalia, Sleepwalk Immersive was part of the book launch for Anne Corlett's The Theatre of Glass and Shadows, which has an immersive theatre production at the core of its story. How did that collaboration come out? Sebastian: Anne - who’s an amazing, talented, lovely individual - came to see the first run of Bacchanalia and then later introduced herself during the second run. My first memories of that project were meeting Anne in a café in Putney and talking about the book, talking about the launch, and just being really, really excited by it. It was quite nice personally as well to do something like that because my brain has just been stuck in the Sixties for the last seven years. It was really cool to be inspired by such a great piece of new writing. It felt really fresh. We'd be keen to do more of that if anyone has any books coming out soon... Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin There's brand new content for fans of the last two runs to experience, a longer runtime, and more experiences for individual audience members, but we're keeping the core of what people saw at CRYPT. IR: Let's discuss the upcoming run of Bacchanalia at Hoxton Hall. How did you settle on that venue being the right space for the show’s return? Sebastian: When it came to the March 2024 run at CRYPT, one of our main objectives was to try and get a bigger venue out of it. We were brainstorming different venues and concluded that because of some of the themes present throughout Bacchanalia, and with Dionysus also being the god of theatre, a conventional theatre space would actually work. I don't know if you remember, but quite a while ago, there was an immersive show at Hoxton Hall based around Hammer Horror. I was too young to go at the time, but my parents went and really enjoyed it. My parents reminded us of that show, so we invited Sam and Stu, who are the Head of Programming and the CEO of Hoxton Hall, down to the second run of the show. They later reached out and said, ‘Hey, come and look at our space.’ I think even upon first impressions, we knew that Bacchanalia would fit very well into the venue. The kind of expansion we were looking to do also fit pretty perfectly with the number of rooms available at Hoxton Hall, and the team has been absolutely amazing. They were so keen to get this kind of work in their building and also came on to co-produce it, which is amazing. They’ve been lovely to work with, and they've been really great at guiding us through lots of stuff that we're less familiar with. It's felt like a very natural fit. IR: Given the expanded space you've got to work with this time, that's going to have an impact on basically every part of how the 2023/2024 show was structured and timed. When planning and rehearsing for this Hoxton Hall run, does it feel like an expansion of the previous versions of the show or a complete do-over? Sebastian: I think, to me, it's an expansion. There's brand new content for fans of the last two runs to experience, a longer runtime, and more experiences for individual audience members, but we're keeping the core of what people saw at CRYPT. It's still those themes; it’s still those characters. What we’re finding really exciting and almost freeing is that because of the nature of the space being bigger with separate rooms, we're going to have multiple soundtracks and different things playing in different rooms. It means we don't have to compromise as much on the overall vision. A space like CRYPT, where you're limited by the sound capabilities, meant we only have one soundtrack. If one character had a sad scene, but these three other characters had a happy scene, we had to prioritise the happy scene, and you’d get happy music in this sad scene. It's been really great to be able to compromise less on the individual characters' arcs too. Hopefully, people will feel like these characters have more time to develop their own story as well as the overall narrative. In particular, the Maenads have been fleshed out more, and it's really given us the freedom and space to dive a bit deeper into these characters. Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin This show has to be created from the audience's point of view. How do we want the audience to feel? How can we treat the audience with love and respect? IR: Something that came up last time we spoke was that the CRYPT version of the show was a scaled-back version of what you’d originally written years prior. Is staging the show at Hoxton Hall going to allow you to realise the full scope of the script? Sebastian: I think the thing to bear in mind is when I first wrote the show, I was just a teenager who had no perception of what it takes to put on a show or how much money, hard work, and time it actually takes to create. The 100% full Bacchanalia would require so many resources; it’s probably not particularly doable at this stage. I'd say the show has definitely expanded, though. It's closer to that vision. We'd love to keep expanding the show forever and ever, but the way we've done it for this venue feels appropriate and achievable, given the time and resources we have. IR: One element of the previous staging of Bacchanalia that I think people loved was the intimacy and smaller moments with audiences. Is that still the case with the 2025 version? Sebastian: We’re doing our very best to maintain that sense of intimacy, but I personally believe that sometimes it's easy to mistake intimacy for proximity. It really helps to build that into a setting if you are very close physically to the performance, but it needs to be embedded in the writing and the creation of the show. Our aims are definitely to maintain that sense of intimacy, but with a bigger space and bigger rooms, we can explore how we carry that intimacy through to a larger space. Can we have epic moments as well as these intimate moments and explore the relationship between the two? It sounds really cheesy, but it comes from an audience's point of view. This has only been my job for a couple of years, and before that, I was an audience member. That's something I'm really keen for our creatives to hold on to. This show has to be created from the audience's point of view. How do we want the audience to feel? How can we treat the audience with love and respect? When we say ‘the audience’, we don't mean the 90 people; we mean this one person. We like to think of them very much as individuals. Photo: Ivy Corbin IR: The pedigree of the people involved in 2023/2024’s Bacchanalia was incredibly high, and it’s only gotten better this time around with an expanded cast. What’s it been like welcoming these new faces into the Sleepwalk family? Sebastian: For us, casting is such an important thing. Getting the right people in the room is one of the most important parts of doing this. We're just really lucky to get these people. It’s insane. All the new cast members have come in with a really great attitude. With the wealth of experience that we've gotten, especially with the new cast coming in, there are years and years of immersive work behind them. It's invaluable to get those creative minds in the room, working on a show like this. I've been watching Rob [McNeill] and Oli [Towse] work since I was little, and I wanted to work with them all that time. Luckily, because of the connections we made and through some of our team, we have some ins with that world and those kinds of cast members. This show wouldn't be nearly what it is if it weren't for the brilliant cast attached to it. It's also been really good to have the gang back together. It's lovely to see Pete doing Dionysus again. Over the last two days [of rehearsals], it's been great to see them do their thing. I'm really looking forward to diving into these characters more in rehearsals and seeing where that takes us. IR: Finally, with just a couple of weeks to go until the Hoxton Hall run begins, what are your feelings towards getting audiences back in to experience the show? Sebastian: We can't wait to welcome everyone back to the new Thebes! This run, out of all of them, is really audience-led. Hopefully, if we’ve done our job right, there will be some really interesting stuff for people who've seen the show before to enjoy, and we'll be taking care of and respecting the people who are new to the show as well. Rehearsals for Bacchanalia (2025) Photos: James Lawson Bacchanalia will run at Hoxton Hall from 11th March to 6th April 2025. Tickets are priced from £54.00 and can be purchased here. For more information about the show, visit sleepwalkimmersive.com

Photo: Virtually Opera Immersive Rumours: Hi Leo. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. Do you mind introducing yourself and telling us a bit about Virtually Opera? Leo Doulton: Hi, I'm Leo. I'm Artistic Director of Virtually Opera and creator of the Uncanny Things Trilogy. I have been working in immersive/interactive theatre since 2019 and in the arts more generally for over a decade now, which is a terrifying thought. I've been experimenting within interactive/immersive theatre, particularly through my work as Associate Creative Director of The Key of Dreams, and in my own work with Virtually Opera. With the latter, we've been experimenting with interactive, immersive opera. That is to say, a fusion of the two forms. Virtually Opera's mission statement is to create beautiful entertainment through fusion opera. I love going to something and having a good time, but also being devastatingly moved, and that's what Virtually Opera exists to try and do. Virtually Opera's own little history is that in 2017, it was set up initially making cinematically filmed opera that we’d put on YouTube. No one watched it because who watches anything that's on YouTube? In 2019, I had a catalogue of, I think, just under a hundred different cinematically filmed operas where the makers weren't filming it like a stage show - they'd sat down and made a bloody movie. Around the same time, I'd started doing these experiments in interactive/immersive opera. That ended up being a really interesting and rewarding strand of work. It started off with a weird little show called ‘We Sing I Sang’. The audience is a hive mind, essentially, deciding what a collective unconscious does as it flees its dying home world. A big part of what Virtually Opera’s interactive work is about is the sense that humans care about stuff and, generally speaking, want to at least try to be decent. Trusting that if you give a group of people the chance to build a community together, they're going to take it seriously, as long as you ask them to, is generally something we found pays off. IR: We’re speaking today about The Uncanny Things trilogy, which is coming to COLAB Tower next month. Can you give us an overview of what all three of those shows entail? Leo: The Uncanny Things Trilogy is a set of shows all taking place in the same world, a world much like our own, except that the supernatural is real and it's a presence. When you hear a voice just on the edge of hearing, when you see something out of the corner of your eye, maybe it's not an Uncanny Thing, but it possibly is. Each show works as a standalone piece, and in all of them, you are negotiating with these Uncanny Things to try and serve your community and yourself. They're all variants on a theme of ritual, but it might be that this is a very solemn ritual, it might be that it’s an ecstatic ritual, and then some of them are much darker, more intense rituals, and if you don't handle it well, consequences can happen. You don't have to sing, incidentally. People often ask that. Singing is very much not required, although a remarkable number of people do choose to, which is charming when you have someone joining in that way. Photo: Charley Ipsen IR: What was the inspiration for the first show in the trilogy, Come Bargain With Uncanny Things? Leo: It came from various places. I'd been working in contemporary opera for about five years at that point. There are things I love about contemporary opera, but there are things I find frustrating, such as the tradition of being a form for specialist audiences, which leads to a lot of it being fairly difficult for outsiders to come into. As a result, if you don't know the tradition, maybe you don't want to come. I sometimes use the parallel of if you are giving advice to a young person who’s going, ‘Why doesn't anyone I want to date like me?’ You don't go, ‘Keep doing the same thing, but louder!’ You say, ‘Maybe you need to go and brush your teeth.’ Similarly, I fell in love with interactive/immersive theatre with Parabolic Theatre's Crisis, What Crisis? The agency and use of dramatic structures to tell stories were really interesting to me. I learnt a lot from how Parabolic put on shows. I also have a deep interest in epic stories from around the world and the different narrative structures that you might find in them. The Kalevala, for example, has one narrative structure, which is, you have three different characters, and their stories are basically kind of separate, then occasionally they hang out together. You see that in The Lord of the Rings - the Fellowship is together, and then Frodo and Sam do their thing, and Aragorn goes and does their thing. Sometimes they reunite, and sometimes they go away. Tolkien is obviously influenced by that structure. How do you take a story structure and make it do something ritualistic? Well, you take a story structure that's not designed to be about winning. It's about relating to things. IR: Come Bargain With Uncanny Things had a two-week run at COLAB Tavern back in 2022. How was it having an audience come in and live in that world? Leo: That’s kind of why we're bringing it back. Because it was really fun. In that version of the show, we got to really understand the different things people wanted to do. People would come in, and they'd really care about it, to the extent that people started coming back. Which we were delighted by, but also we weren't necessarily expecting that. We discovered ways that the world would tend to grow around what different people suggested and how flexible we could be. We discovered how creative people could be in this space and how open they would be to the invitation of ‘Would you like to come and help your neighbours?’ That's the basic question Come Bargain asks you. It's just small local problems. You're not here to save the world, and people did want that. They didn't care about winning. They just cared about relating. Photo: Charley Ipsen IR: It's interesting that you focused on creating a relatively low-stakes environment for the show to exist in. That seems to go against what most other experiences do. Leo: I think for certain genres, it's absolutely the right thing to do. If you're doing a show about war, your stakes are life and death. I would say, however, the audience generally speaking assumes you're not going to murder one of your performers, which makes it quite hard to make those stakes believable. The stakes of ‘I am worried about my neighbour who’s sick’ are small. It's much easier to play that. I don't know you well enough to go, ‘Do you have a member of your family who is maybe elderly or vulnerable?’ but I suspect the answer is yes, because you're a human being. You and I have both reached an age where we are aware that we are mortal. Therefore, if you make the scales ‘I'm a human being and that's sometimes hard’, it means something to people. IR: Following on from Come Bargain, there was Come Worship Our Uncanny King, which was performed at Voidspace Live in 2024. Did you want to start working on that show as soon as you finished the run of Come Bargain? Leo: Initially after Come Bargain, I thought, ‘Well, that's done. I'd like to bring Come Bargain back someday, and maybe we can have a show where you see the community develop based on what the previous show did’. I thought we'd just do it nice and straightforward and easily. This would have been sensible. I ended up having other work come up, which was delightful. Thank you to everyone who did that, but it meant the show sat in the back of my head for a little while. We took a lot of what we had seen in Come Bargain’s audience, where there were some people who were weirdly enthusiastic about doing what the Uncanny Thing wanted. Come Worship is a show for those people. It came out of that sense of people being invested in this world. The entire world-building of Come Bargain is designed to support this question of ‘How do we relate to the Uncanny Thing?’ Metaphorically, how do we relate to the world, our community, and each other in this space? In that show, you do that as equals. In Come Worship Our Uncanny King, you do that from a position of grotesquely less power because you have the Uncanny King there. That's an interesting situation to put people in. Photo: Claire Shovelton IR: Come Murder An Uncanny Thing is being performed for the first time in front of an audience at COLAB Tower. Does that give you any trepidation? Leo: You are more than experienced enough to know that if I said anything other than yes, I'd be lying. Obviously, it causes trepidation. A lot of the individual mechanics, if you have been to the weird little Fringe shows I've done over the past few years, will be familiar. There's one mechanic of the audience shaping how a certain conversation plays out between the Uncanny Thing and the audience through very light touch musical elements, which people may have seen remarkably well at Into The Dreamlands last year at the London Lovecraft Festival. There's another mechanic for how do you punish the Uncanny Thing? This is the show where you have power over it, after all, which was something I developed in residency at Theatre Deli in 2023. The overall structure is, I think, solid. There is, of course, trepidation because maybe all of these things come together, and they go clunk. This is probably where it's worth mentioning the performance team. Fundamentally, this is a show about humans being human together. The mechanics are only a means to that end. I have absolute confidence that the ensemble we have is going to be able to bring something beautiful to that of ‘Here's a group of people who've got together to decide to murder a supernatural creature'. There are mechanics around it, and there are specific ways you're doing that, but really, the interesting thing is how are you going to occupy the space where you have agreed to murder something. IR: Across all three shows, there’s a shifting power balance between the audience and the Uncanny Thing. What about that idea is so appealing to you as a creator? Leo: I have to credit Katy Naylor of Voidspace for the insight of me being interested in power as a theme. She's been following my work for a while and just said that very casually. It explains a lot of things. I have a background in History, and a lot of my education was by Marxian historians who are not Marxists, but they are interested in similar ideas of class dynamics, economic dynamics, and who holds power in a society and why. We live in an age of climate change. We live in a world where you turn on the news, and basically every day, the world is more powerful than you. You cannot individually do anything about climate change. You have to live with it. Similarly, for many people, the government is more powerful than you in ways you can't necessarily understand. It just is. How do you live with that? You and I have just had a coffee and green tea. We live in a world where, by virtue of the fact we have a fairly small amount of capital by the standards of our society, there is someone on the other side of the world who has picked those things, put them in a cup, and I can just get them to do that by spending £3. I have power over my world. What do I do with it? That's an interesting set of questions for those metaphors of how do you relate to the world, the community, and each other? We have no power against the climate, but we also do have power over nature. We have no power against humans with power, but we also do have power over other humans. I will say, you don't have to think about any of those things at the show. Just come and beat the shit out of an Uncanny Thing... Photo: Charley Ipsen IR: How does opera fit within all three of the shows? Leo: As with immersive, there are competing definitions of what is opera. This show goes, ‘This is a world of constant music. The music is improvised to reflect that world's story’. We know that there are certain motifs, certain melodies, and certain harmonies that are associated with different things. If, for example, you make the worlds more Uncanny, more supernatural, you might notice that the music suddenly gets a bit more crunchy and weird because that's one of the things we've got in the vocabulary of music for the show. That's all in response to how the audience changed the world. It's a way of expressing there's magic happening and showing the world shifting. This is drama about the community and their world, not about the characters.. In the fiction of the world, the Uncanny Things don't like human voices, but they respond really well to singing. If you are one of the Bargainers, your job professionally is to control these things and to negotiate with them. You sing to it, and you sing while you're conducting this ritual. The community doesn't have to sing because why would they? They're not professional Bargainers, and also because I'm not an arsehole. IR: What were the audience reactions to Come Bargain With Uncanny Things like from those who were previously unfamiliar with opera? Leo: I think they preferred it to the opera people. I think for them, they were able to understand the idea of ‘I’m meant to be a person in this world, and I'm acting as a human being with agency because we have free will.’ They just got that. For them, the music was just like, ‘Oh, that's super cool, there's this person who is professionally singing’. Weirdly, some of the opera people got super into it and were like, ‘Oh, I'm actually allowed to be a human being while being in the show. That's super cool. I've never had that before.’ There were other people who sat down and just went, ‘Well, I just want to watch it. I know I came to this interactive, immersive opera, but I'm confused by both the fact that I'm in the world and I'm being expected to do stuff.’ Some people came and, admittedly, they said that this isn't opera because they felt the role of the music was not sufficiently expressing the drama of the story. Which was interesting. There are definitely some operas that don't fit within this definition, and that's a conversation that I can have until the cows come home. Photo: Virtually Opera IR: So those elements of the Uncanny Things Trilogy shouldn’t be a turn-off to those intimidated about going to anything labelled ‘opera’? Leo: For the specific thing we're trying to make, the world is told through music, the world is supernatural, and the supernatural is achieved through music. But we're doing all of that work for you. The music is designed for that purpose, which means it is easy and welcoming. If the main thing you listen to is Chappell Roan, great! Come along. You don't need to know shit about opera to come. It's an unreasonable expectation fundamentally. The opera is a tool towards telling the story and creating the experience. It's not designed as a test of ‘Are you opera enough?’. Let's say you have a relative who goes to church, or you've been to church for Christmas. In that environment, it makes total sense that at some point a guy comes out and does a hymn. But you don't have to know about it to understand that when you do rituals, people sing. There is something weird that happens with music, and we all recognise that, whatever music we listen to. IR: If there's one takeaway you'd want people to take from attending The Uncanny Things Trilogy, what would it be? Leo: I want them to walk away feeling like they've been welcomed and that they've been human. I want people to come away feeling like they've been in a community and they've done something important. Whether that is you having worshipped the King, you have Bargained, or you have Murdered. Ultimately, the title says Uncanny Things, but that is only because by relating to the Uncanny Things, hopefully you do something deeply human. Also, I hope they've genuinely had a good time. The shows should be fun in the proper sense of the word. It's not just ‘I've engaged with content and it was fun’, but ‘I got to be a human being and be entertained, and that's just really fucking important sometimes.’ Photo: Claire Shovelton The Uncanny Things Trilogy runs from 4th March to 30th March 2025 at COLAB Tower near London Bridge. Standard tickets for each show are priced at £45, and tickets are available for all three shows as a bundle for £105. For more info and to book tickets, visit designmynight.com