Never have I left a show with quite such a raging desire to tell the world all about it. And never have I felt so honour-bound not to reveal too much about what I’ve just been through.
Sure, I can toss in standard-issue words such as “interactive” and “immersive”. I can say that it is like being a real-life Mr Benn. I can say it makes you feel like Alice, shunted from one district of Wonderland to another. I can say it’s like a dozen anxiety dreams made flesh (and fun) in 40 minutes. And I can say that this is the latest, biggest iteration of a show that Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd devised in 2004, since when it has gone on to be one of the biggest cult successes in British theatre.
Yet like everyone who takes this ride I’ve signed a document promising not to reveal its secrets. Even if I hadn’t, I would know that it had such a profound, once-in-a-lifetime effect on me precisely because I knew nothing of what to expect. You have to take leaps into the unknown, figurative and literal. You have to think on your feet.
Some of what you end up saying or doing will make you proud. Some of it will make you cringe. Some of it will make you laugh out loud at the sheer audacity of it all, the sheer scale of it, the sheer skill and commitment that the 450 — 450! — volunteers show to sustain the fiction each night. (Tickets sold out in seconds, but the show always needs volunteers.)
And that’s why You Me Bum Bum Train is quite so phenomenal. You don’t watch it, you don’t traipse after it, it demands total involvement from participants, who each set off alone at five-minute intervals. It demands that you make decisions at speed, choices you only later have time to question or analyse.
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“Character,” as the script guru Robert McKee says, “is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure.” And what you do in an environment that is insanely imaginative, unthreatening but nonetheless pressurised does say a lot about who you are. You’ll never get a chance quite like it again. It’s simply sensational.
To mid-November; bumbumtrain.com