Immersive Theatre Review - You Me Bum Bum Train

Mark Twain famously said that two people could keep a secret if one of them was dead.

You Me Bum Bum Train has to be one of the best secrets that several thousand people have managed to keep. Before becoming a passenger, as audience members are known, I was surprised how little information had leaked out. NDAs nothwithstanding, in a digital world, you would expect more details to have emerged over the years. Following my visit, I understand why there is so little information circulating. Once you’ve experienced You Me Bum Bum Train, you don’t want to do anything that would spoil it for anyone who might, with a hefty dose of luck, managed to snare tickets in this or any future run.

This means that reviews are necessarily sparse on detail, but there is a common theme running through most accounts of the show. The majority of reviewers refer to the show as ‘life-changing’, ‘transformative’ and ‘self-revelatory.’ I have to admit that I was slightly sceptical about the strength of these claims, and I say that as someone who has spent the last decade immersing myself in the work of Punchdrunk, Sleepwalk Immersive, Colab, Lemon Difficult, Swamp Motel and many more.

Immersive theatre isn’t just about the performers. When it is done well, it’s also about you. Your own reactions and responses feed into the narrative. You bring your own experiences and opinions and biases and baggage, and you draw your own conclusions and create your own interpretations. Something that’s fascinated me since my first experience of immersive theatre – Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man – is the relationship between performer and audience. It’s about moments of connection, about being seen, being part of something. This is particularly apparent in the style of show popularised by Punchdrunk and now almost a genre in its own right. In Punchdrunk’s signature productions, the audience are free to roam the set, choosing which storylines to follow – and sometimes being drawn into one of the intensely coveted one-to-one scenes.

From that first visit, I knew I wanted to write about immersive theatre, but it tool several false starts for me to work out what story I wanted to tell. The Theatre of Glass and Shadows is set in an alternate London where a vast theatre district has grown up around an immersive show that has been running for centuries. The district is intensely secretive, the show an unpredictable mix of lure and exclusion, one minute extending a hand to draw you in, the next, holding you at arm’s length. The show’s most dedicated fans long for those instances of connection, to be chosen, to be noticed.

When I first discovered immersive theatre, I also discovered that I apparently have a sign above my head, visible to everyone but me, saying ‘Hello! I am deeply awkward and not fond of hugging. Please take me away, remove my anonymising mask, and bestow a very, very close-up and personal scene upon me, while tenderly embracing me. Bonus points if you ask me difficult questions and expect me to actually answer. With words.’ With an almost scientific level of thoroughness, I blundered into all the most sought-after one-to-one experiences available in immersive theatre at the time, and I started to question certain things about myself. Maybe I wasn’t just being intensely British about the eye-contact and the hugging. Maybe it was…me.

Around this time, I went for some therapy to unpack a few things that had been well and truly packed up for many years. If those therapy sessions were the theory, my immersive theatre experiences were, in many ways, the practicals. What would happen if I stepped forward, rather than back? What would happen if I came closer? What would happen if I took the outstretched hand? What would happen if I worried just a little bit less about getting things wrong, about breaking some unspoken rule, about making a fool of myself? I had several more one-to-one experiences, and while I was always delighted to be picked for them, I never fully relaxed into the scenes or engaged with them as actively as other people described. Immersive theatre persuaded me to step outside my comfort zone. It made me push my limits. But those limits were definitely still there.

Many reviews of You Me Bum Bum Train talk about letting go, taking the brakes off, breaking your self-imposed limits. I could do that, I thought, ahead of my visit. I was far braver than I used to be, far less self-conscious. This would be the pinnacle of my ten year immersive journey of self-discovery and growth. It was – but not in the way I expected. You Me Bum Bum Train is the ultimate one-to-one. It has the same scarcity value, with tickets like hen’s teeth, and when you are going through the show, it is all about you. Your reactions. Your responses. It was both terrifying and brilliant.

In the immediate aftermath, I was convinced that I’d got it wrong. I’d missed the point. I’d had the one-to-one to end all one-to-ones and I’d been to British, too me to make the most of the experience. Then I had it – the epiphany, the moment of revelation that people talk about. I realised that it’s fine to have limits. It’s fine to have a comfort zone. You don’t have to change every aspect of yourself because you discover something that doesn’t come naturally, or which you find challenging. There are some things that I find easy which I used to find hard, and there are some things that I am always going to find difficult. I can stand up and talk about my books, or about the writing process, in front of any size of audience without so much as a squirm of nerves, but I still get a bit sweaty-palmed walking into a social event where I don’t know anyone.

You Me Bum Bum Train made me look at who I am now, and how far I’ve come in terms of confidence and being comfortable in my own skin, and say ‘This is okay. This is more than okay.’

Before you go into the show, someone makes sure that you know how to signal that you want to stop. That signal went entirely out of my head in the first minute of the experience, and I’m extremely glad that it did. If I had tapped out, I would probably have regretted it for the rest of my life. It was an incredible experience, and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. To anyone thinking it might not be your thing, I would say do it anyway. If you have a chance to see this show, grab it with both hands. You Me Bum Bum Train might change your life – or it might make you realise that you’re actually pretty happy with the one you have.