It was a cold night to be wandering around a large warehouse. A cold night in a large warehouse in a classified part of London, the location for the latest creation by Secret Cinema. Part immersive theatre, part bespoke film screening, part cosplay parade, the company has created a new kind of entertainment experience. They charge a lot to get in – standard tickets for this event were £67 – and are not shy of asking you to pay more once inside. In London, though, there is no shortage of demand, even when the temperature dictates that you keep your outfit under a decent winter coat.
Secret Cinema asks that the location remain unspecified. They also ask that the identity of the film remain under wraps. Unlike recent productions of Star Wars and Back to the Future, this is a Tell No One event, where part of the fun comes from working out which film you’re about to see. (Although it could be said that, if you’re willing to fork out that much without knowing what the film is, you can’t be that fussy about what will eventually pop up on screen.)
The experience begins before you even arrive, when you are accosted on the street by youngsters in postwar military uniforms barking instructions on how to render your phone unusable (answer: stick it in a plastic sac). The actors speak in American accents that veer from Joan Rivers to David Niven but tend to settle on Al Pacino. Once your phone is sealed they usher you down a maze of corridors. Urgent tannoy announcements – “Silk stockings have been found in the basement, will the owner please report to the communications desk” – make clear you’re on a military base. The communications desk is in the main space, that well-ventilated warehouse, a scaffolding frame denoting different rooms and operations, each containing vintage props, from reel-to-reel tape machines to an effects synthesiser that could easily have been made 30 years later. From there the fun begins.
A happy byproduct of attending Secret Cinema is that it makes you consider what fun actually is. It shows you that, for some, dressing up is entertainment in itself. That people take acute pleasure in finding precisely the right gear (on this occasion more military wear) and making it look sharp or svelte or sexy, or indeed as if it’s been dragged through three days of combat. It shows you that, even in this digital age, people want to play parlour games; like being tasked with finding one of Secret Cinema’s 35 actors and getting them to sign a piece of paper. It shows that people are still charmed by the idea of drinking booze out of a coffee mug. It also shows that such behaviours make for ideal date-night material (at least three-quarters of the crowd of hundreds were couples in their 20s and 30s).
For other people (or for me, at least) the idea of forced jollity and compelled interaction is as attractive as snake sashimi. When it comes to my cinema, I’m generally prefer to sit in a darkened room with an illicit lager and the intense hope that it’s over in less than two hours. About an hour into the experience, and after eating a mess can’s worth of macaroni cheese (£6) just for the warmth, I was starting to grind my teeth with impatience. But then a plot device was deployed, announced by a chorus of klaxons and flashing red lights. The punters’ group exercises stopped and the actors began to interact with each other and issue individual instructions.
This bit appealed to my nosy side. And my desire to have people’s attention focused entirely on me. I went looking for special instructions and I received them. At various points I was tasked with exposing a communist, aiding a communist, following a communist and passing a letter to a communist wearing gold lipstick in a secret bar (drinks: £6). I particularly enjoyed following the communist, at least up until the point I told her I’d been tasked with following her. Within 30 seconds she’d lost me.
At this point, what had previously felt contrived became an immersive entertaining spectacle. Whether this was the same for everyone, whether I took the actors’ promptings too seriously, I don’t know. I do know that when the klaxons started up again and an emergency demanded we all move to a previously unopened space, I was sad it had all come to an end.
It hadn’t, of course, because the film was still to come and the cinema had the highest production values of all. Six screens ran around the auditorium, two playing out the main action, four showing complementary images. The seating was convened around a central stage which was bathed in a ring of white light. On it, some of the actors silently recreated the film word for word. I couldn’t quite get the point of this (it confused rather than illuminated what was going on onscreen) but there was no doubting that this was a real spectacle. Those paying £135 for a VIP ticket got to sit up front with bottles of champagne.
The evening ended in an explosion of confetti and we made our way to the exits. It was still cold outside but I had been warmed by the kindness (and secret instructions) of strangers. What’s more, by this point the cast had started to let their accents slip. Getting directions to the tube was a simple task.
