Immersive theatre review - Doin' The Lambeth Walk (Oi!)
Sunday did not start well.
What should have been a straightforward train journey to London turned into a three hour test of endurance, involving a cancelled rail replacement bus service, a detour on what the now-firmly-bonded passengers were calling the rail replacement bus replacement rail service, a side-quest to locate a lady’s lost luggage which turned out to be exactly where she turned out have thought it was – which raises some questions about all the shouting and yelling at everyone in the vicinity of an entirely different luggage rack in an entirely different carriage – and an entire Bakerloo line carriage falling stunned into silence by the recording and rerecording of a furious voice note by a young woman set on making sure her boyfriend understood how he had failed to come up to scratch.
Several times, I questioned whether the journey was worth it. Also, whether the immersive experience I was supposed to be attending had actually already commenced the moment I set foot on the platform at Bath Spa station, with everyone else a performer in my own personal immersive journey-from-hell.
Spoiler – it was worth it.
I was lucky enough to be invited to the premier of Minimum Labyrinth’s new immersive walk/show/tour/experience, Doin’ The Lambeth Walk (Oi!)* As anyone reading this website might gather, I am partial to immersive experiences, and there was a particular appeal to one in Lambeth. The Theatre of Glass and Shadows is set in an alternate version of the area, with references to the borough’s long-running struggle to hold its borders against the expansion of the secretive Theatre District.
Despite missing the start, due to the aforementioned journey-from-hell, I managed to intercept the group on Lambeth High Street, and a hissed update from my plus-one – or whatever you call a plus-one if the one they’re plus to isn’t actually there – brought me up to speed. Minimum Labyrinth’s latest offering is a deep dive into Lambeth’s history, by way of the tunnels and passages and tiny corners you’d never know were there, unless you lived locally, and perhaps not even then. It treads the edge of the uncanny and the hidden, weaving together threads of stories into something that is more about the idea of the city than it is about the names and dates written into its annals.
The performance elements all take place in public, with passers-by seeming intrigued, and the city itself becoming a giant set, as a classic black cab rolls through the delivery of famous lines about the city, or a red London bus drives behind an unfolding scene on a corner of a busy street. There is a sense of being slightly out of time, out of step with the ordinary world, as though you’re walking subtly different paths to the people around you.
London pulls you into moving quickly. It’s all about getting from Point A to Point B for Purpose C. This experience makes you slow down, look more closely, circle back and look again. You find yourself studying things you wouldn’t normally give a second glance, looking up, back, into, through, behind. It feels like a search for the soul of this corner of the city, for what it has meant to people throughout the centuries.
When we finished the walk and decamped to a nearby pub, there was extensive yammering for new dates for some of Minimum Labyrinth’s previous productions. I will certainly be bookmarking their website, in the hope of taking another walk with them, in another part of the city that I thought I knew.
For more information, visit Minimum Labyrinth’s website here