This meant we had to follow the action by shuffling from room to room and sit on piles of newspapers. What I like least about immersive theatre is that it rarely lives up to the name or the promise. At Enquirer neither were we immersed—just shunted awkwardly between scenes—nor at liberty to challenge what we were seeing. When one of the hacks asks if it isn't the "fault" of readers that they prefer the Daily Mail to the Guardian by some considerable margin, we mere readers were not consulted. Add to this the sheer infantilism of a lot of the immersive shenanigans which unfailingly remind me of school trips in primary school. We were addressed by an orderly who warned us that we might have to move fast through the production (some hope, it turned out), and sit quite close to each other. Thrills!
Immersiveness also sucked intellectual rigour out of a play which was already one-sided. The sole defender of popular journalism, Roger Alton of The Times and formerly editor of the Observer, was sent up as mendacious and evasive from the start, though he looked rather appealing to me compared with an erstwhile Express journalist whining that she couldn't get the front page for a story about a massacre in East Timor because a royal engagement nabbed her glory-spot. Enquirer also mirrored a doleful tendency to see everything in decline and no potential in a new era of digital journalism. The mixture of sanctimony and self-interest was not an appealing one.
Clearly suffering from latent masochism, I accepted an invitation to another immersive event from the Secret Cinema club. It has thousands of mainly young Londoner adherents, and offers an evening of adventure, leading up to a "secret" screening of a film somewhere clandestine. We duly trudged to Hackney Library for a bit of stilted role-play about being American prisoners in the days of Prohibition, before shuffling on to a bus with darkened windows. "Keep your right hand on the shoulder of the person in front," snapped an actor as we negotiated the wilds of E8. Halfway through all this the Talking Heads line "You may ask yourself, how did I get here?" snapped into my befuddled mind. Reader: I de-immersed, to the clear horror of the organisers, and got the first bus out. Doubtless most of the others went on to enjoy a film and meet other immersively obedient fans. In terms of any wider pretensions to enliven theatre, though, immersiveness feels like an idea whose time has come and gone rather fast.
