It’s rare to find any sort of live entertainment in London at 10am, but Monopoly appears to be doing a brisk trade. And so here I am, a middle-tier arts journalist, arriving at stop one of my journey: Monopoly Lifesized on Tottenham Court Road. Alas, IRL I have all the killer business instincts of a baby rabbit. If I could apply these principles to my actual life then I’d own a fancy Park Lane hotel, probably with a Salt Bae pop-up rinsing punters in the basement. Me! I love Monopoly, and am notorious within my family for being such a sharkish uber-capitalist – obsessed with expansion at all costs – that I’m absolutely zero fun to play against. ‘I’ve got one question for you…’ roars an actor dressed as Mr Monopoly, the top-hatted tycoon mascot of the beloved board game Monopoly. Photo by Laura Gallant 10.15am-12.30pm: Monopoly Lifesized Is Dans Le Noir immersive? Is Ballie Ballerson ? Is STRINGFELLOWS ? And who is going to this stuff? Is it a ‘scene’? Or is it just a buzzword blithely applied to a selection of completely disparate things? I decided that to truly understand, I would need to immerse myself in immersive: five shows, across five different genres, in one day, something I very strongly suspect nobody else has done before. A ‘Doctor Who’ immersive show recently closed, and a ‘SAW’ immersive show is coming soon. In fact, probably the most influential purveyor is Secret Cinema, whose increasingly grandiose line in pre-film entertainment for screenings of classic movies has upstaged the films themselves (its latest, ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’, includes the option to not even bother watching the film).īut what actually links London’s many immersive shows? In the last few years our city has gained a ‘Great Gatsby’ show, a Gunpowder Plot show, a ‘Sherlock’ show, a ‘Stranger Things’ show, a recreation of ‘The Crystal Maze’, an unofficial ‘Fawlty Towers’ dining experience, an official ABBA dining experience, a faux-tube dining experience and a dining experience that is an unofficial mash-up of ‘Moulin Rouge!’ and Disney’s ‘Mulan’. But their arty masterworks feel like their own thing. It’s a descriptor that has long been applied to pioneering theatre companies like Punchdrunk (whose work was originally referred to as ‘site-specific’).
Although the term could retrospectively be applied to all sorts of things – theme parks! paintball! Roman orgies! – it’s only in the last decade or so that it’s become a ubiquitous description for basically any sort of live show with an interactive element. London is a city in which ‘immersive’ entertainment has become big business.
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