SheSeesStars: ★★★★★
I’ve been aware of You Me Bum Bum Train since its first London incarnation in 2012, which was both wildly popular and totally impossible to get a ticket for. I somehow missed the news that the show was returning to London, but happened upon a tweet a couple of weeks ago saying the show was extending through November and was operating a ballot for tickets. Thinking ‘there’s no harm in trying’ but never for a minute imagining my name would be drawn (apparently 80,000 people tried to get tickets for the 2012 production), I entered my details and then pretty much forgot about it. That is until I received an email entitled ‘Congratulations’…
Now, the whole point of YMBBT is that almost nothing is known about it by those attending. The deliberately weird press photos (see right) give absolutely nothing away. I did know that it was often described as a ‘ride’ and that audience members, termed ‘passengers’, participated in the show one at a time. I’d seen Stephen Fry tweet about how amazing it was. My curiosity had also led me to look up a couple of online articles; although there was no indication of actual content, there was enough there to indicate that it would put me firmly outside my personal comfort zone. I hated drama lessons at school, and I’m not the biggest fan of surprises, so why would I want to put myself through something like this? My finger wavered over the ‘purchase’ button for a good minute before actually clicking. But as a theatre fan who hates to miss out on a big ‘event’ (as I had the previous week when I had to return a ticket to Cumberbatch Hamlet due to a stinking cold), and in an early commitment to the spirit of YMBBT itself, I decided to take the plunge.
I nearly didn’t make it to the show; my stinking cold was still sticking around in the form of a lingering cough, clogged up ears and general lethargy. YMBBT sounded to me very much like the kind of thing best enjoyed when in full health. However, on the morning I was booked to see the show, I decided I had just about enough energy to face what was to come.
At this point, I want to reassure anyone associated with YMBBT who might be reading that I’m not about to spill details about the show’s content. Having signed a waiver form/non-disclosure agreement, and now having experienced YMBBT, I totally understand and fully support the importance of keeping it secret. The nature of YMBBT also makes it an intensely personal experience, which no two people would have the same reaction to. What follows is therefore a ‘review’ only in the sense of giving my own reactions to the experience. Fellow passengers may recognise some of their own experience in mine and may know which parts of the show inspired which comments in this post, but for those who haven’t seen the show I don’t think there’s anything here that would spoil it.
YMBBT pushes its passengers into such wildly diverse scenarios that no one lifetime could include them all; in fact I’m willing to wager that there’s one scenario included that noone will ever experience. It’s almost guaranteed that whatever your skills or your outlook on life, something during the experience will yank you fully out of your comfort zone. The first instance of this for me came right at the start; when asked to walk through the first of many doors of the evening I hesitated due to a personal phobia, but a quick few words of reassurance from a member of the team were enough for me to take the first step. In a neat way this taught me how to approach the experience – I just had to relax a bit, give up any thoughts I might have of control for the next 45 minutes and go for it.
Surrender was the only real option. With barely a second to think, the YMBBT experience is a case of allowing your instincts to take over and seeing what they make you say and do. In that sense it’s as close as I’ve ever been to an out of body experience. Although you never know what’s behind the next door, you can be sure it’ll be something new that will cause a visceral response: mine ranged from bewilderment to fear, sadness to elation and defiance to compassion, to name just a few. The whole thing was scary, funny, enlightening, exhilarating… and pretty much indescribable.
I genuinely surprised myself with how well I handled some scenarios that I would have avoided like the plague in real life; only in one did I feel that I ‘failed’. In all the others something inside me – an opinion, a scrap of existing knowledge, even something I’d seen on TV – kicked in and enabled me to cope with what was being thrown at me. It’s a really strange sensation to realise, in the midst of a situation you’ve never been in before, that you somehow know how to behave. Some of the scenarios were genuinely thrilling, and things I won’t ever experience for real; to enjoy them for just a couple of minutes was quite something, and I thank YMBBT for that. Other scenarios were a real eye-opening lesson in walking a mile in someone else’s shoes; I thank YMBBT for that, too.
To temporarily stray into traditional ‘review’ territory, I have to say a huge congratulations to everyone involved in putting on YMBBT. Every person in every scenario (and there are many – it’s hard to know but maybe a couple of hundred?) is a volunteer, and together they create situations that are utterly convincing. By turns intimidating, reassuring or over-the-top enthusiastic, in every case they provide you with just the right cues to immediately understand what’s what. Each set (20 or more?) has an extraordinary amount of attention to detail, way too much for the passenger to take in in the time they spend within it. Some touches made parts of the experience intensely personal – I can only imagine how long it takes to do all this for each of the 70 individual passengers every night. Crazy.
I left YMBBT with a slightly scrambled brain (I kept expecting something weird to happen on the journey home), a hand smelling of antiseptic, and bruised elbows. But I also left with my head held a little higher and just a touch more spring in my stride, knowing that I’d coped well with the vast majority of what had just happened. Show me a closed door now and I’ll definitely be more inclined to open it than I was before I rode the You Me Bum Bum Train. That, rather than the bruises, just might be what stays with me.
YMBBT is back, running on Thursdays and Saturdays during March and April 2016! All passenger tickets are long gone, but you can still volunteer for parts in the show or backstage roles – you might bump in to me if you do. For information on how to volunteer, click here. You can also sign up to the mailing list from the website.
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