Get ready to rumble at Exit Productions’ newest immersive production
The VAULT Festival under Waterloo Station is just warming up for the evening as I arrive on a chilly Thursday evening at the end of January. The festival is in its early days of the season having just opened the week prior, and yet the caverns beneath Waterloo are already thronged with heaving crowds: people killing time at the festival bars as they await their entrance times.
I notice that Leake Street — the heavily graffitied tunnel where the entrance to the Vaults is located — is now showing inarguable signs of trendiness: quirky permanent restaurants are popping up in the once-abandoned storage reservoirs that line the passage. It seems that seven years (since the festival’s inception in 2012) is how long the borough council has needed to take notice that one of their most popular and lucrative yearly events has turned the neglected street into prime hipster real estate.
While I wait with my fellow Fight Night patrons in a holding zone just outside the main festival entrance, I rub feeling back into my arms and nurse my suspicions that all the immersive shows at the Vaults seem to now be staged in their Unit 9 annex location as an intentional boot from the main venue. An academic argument could be made that the snappy cold and lack of crowd atmosphere is intended to keep visitors isolated from the warm throbbing hub of the festival. Some practitioners may argue that staging isn’t “immersive” if you’re being coddled by conveniently placed bars and toilets, but perhaps I just miss the pageantry of passing from the boisterous communal spaces through a curtain into a curated other world. Gone, it seems, are the days of the winding caverns just off the public areas; The Great Gatsby has moved on, and nothing has risen to meet Alice’s Adventures Underground halfway in terms of scope. (Probably I just miss being warm before a show.)
We are welcomed into Unit 9 by a duo of flat-capped fight promoters who are eager to get us emotionally invested as quickly as possible. They advise us that everything we do can and will affect the outcome of the evening’s main event and we’re each issued a stack of betting chips with the encouragement to spend them freely, because the more outgoing patrons will receive opportunities to earn even more chips and the big winner at the end of the evening stands to win a special prize. With these parting words, we are turned loose into the world of Fight Night.
The series of drafty caverns and cubbies winding around the dead space behind Leake Street have been jury-rigged into two dressing rooms, a medical bay, and a boxing ring. Guests may wander freely within this realm as long as the characters think you “can be trusted.” There are areas I’m eventually not welcome in because the character occupants of those spaces have seen me dealing with their opposition, but I manage glimpses of scenes around corners and through curtains, lending an air of covert mystery to the experience. The story is compelling, the characters are dynamic and improvise with the audience regularly, and roundabout halfway through the performance it is evident that audience members are able to cultivate their own character and contribute meaningfully to the story. I myself end up as a judge for the final showdown but I notice that other audience members evolve into ring assistants, VIP investors, and other stakeholders in the outcome of the fight.
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Everyone is playing along, audience members blending in with actors to the point where eventually everyone has their own motivations. Betting is constant throughout the evening and there are many ways to tip the odds in one’s favour: I witness several of my fellow patrons taking an active role in the goings-on. Some are betting aggressively to change the odds on the fighters and yield a higher end result, others are directly approaching characters with information to manipulate the lead-up to the fight — there are whisperings of bribery, steroid abuse, and payoffs to take the fall. More passive viewers need do little more than stand near the action and watch, but there is something going on at all times in almost every area. I am charmed, entirely.
As for the main event? This fight is dirty. Filthy, even, by the time all the little strings of plot begin to knot together. The audience turns out to be populated by a miasma of judges gone corrupt, ring assistants turned snitch, and medical assistants on the take. The promoters who welcomed us at the beginning of the evening said that everything the audience does affects the ending but I’m not sure how much that’s the case, as the final boxing match looks close enough to real. I find myself appreciating what must be either very well-rehearsed choreography or in fact an actual sparring bout.
In the end, what truly matters in this experience is love. It’s easy to fall in love with everyone you talk to (actor and audience alike) while sneaking covert glances across a crowd, catching worried pleading eyes through a not-quite-closed curtain, or exchanging private winks with your fellows. Exit Productions has created a delicious performance that offers full engagement and individual experiences for their patrons, where you don’t need to be an expert in the opportunistic art of immersive theatre to get involved.
Consider this 90-minute performance a contender — one that with a little financial backing and a permanent venue in its corner has real potential to go into extra rounds.
Fight Night continues through February 17. Tickets are £22.
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